A fire reveals a father's secrets. A ghost haunts the living. And a race across the Virginia frontier will determine the fate of knowledge itself.
August 1765. When a laboratory accident burns Shadwell to the ground, twenty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson loses everything?his childhood home, his mother's belongings, the last physical traces of his family's history. But in the ruins, he discovers something that should not exist: a hidden compartment containing encoded documents, strange optical lenses, and a letter from his father, dead these eight years.
Peter Jefferson was not simply the surveyor and magistrate his son remembered. He was the guardian of secrets that powerful men would kill to possess.
The encoded notes lead Jefferson on a treasure hunt across Virginia, from Williamsburg's shadowed streets to the wild frontier beyond the Blue Ridge. At each cache, he finds another piece of a cipher that reveals an impossible destination.
But Jefferson is not alone in his hunt. A ghost wearing his father's face appears at every turn, testing his resolve. And a relentless enemy from his past has learned of the archive's existence. The French officer who escaped justice before has returned, more obsessed and more dangerous than ever. He will stop at nothing to claim what Peter Jefferson protected.
As the race reaches its climax, Jefferson must make a choice his father once faced?a choice about the nature of knowledge itself, about who deserves truth and who decides. The answer will not only determine the fate of the archive but will plant the seeds of everything Thomas Jefferson will one day become.
The Shadwell Cipher is the thrilling conclusion to the Thomas Jefferson: Paranormal Investigator series. It's a story of fathers and sons, secrets and sacrifice, and the dangerous idea that knowledge should belong to everyone.
Book 5 in the Thomas Jefferson: Paranormal Investigator series
His father's greatest secret wasn't what he hid. It was why.
