by Intergrative Ink (Editor), Kent Mayeux (Author)

France, 1720. One stolen document. One ruined life. One way out.

Pierre Mayeux has done nothing wrong. That will not save him.

He has a comfortable home on his father's tax farm in northern France and Simone, the sharecropper's daughter who shares his bed and his secrets. Then Simone robs a passing carriage and takes the hidden receipt book of Antoine Patin - proof that one of France's most powerful tax farmers is stealing from the Crown. The Royal Guard comes for Pierre, not her. Convicted of a crime he did not commit, he is sentenced to three years as an engagé, bound for John Law's wilderness concession at the Arkansas Post in the Louisiana colony.

His family escorts him to La Rochelle to watch him go. On the docks he meets Adrien, who boards La Profond not in chains but by choice. And somewhere between the gangplank and open water, he meets Marie Françoise Sellier - crossing to a country she has never seen, for reasons she will not explain.

Three months of open ocean follow. Storms, sickness, hunger, and a hurricane that drives the ship to the edge of survival. And something none of them planned for: love, taking root in the least likely place on earth.

When La Profond finally limps into Nouveau Biloxi, Pierre steps ashore into a raw and unforgiving new world - carrying a hope he never expected to have.

What he does not know is that Simone, back in France, is carrying something too.

Based on true events. Pierre Mayeux's name survives in the colonial archives of French Louisiana: a passenger landed at Nouveau Biloxi in September 1720, a witness on a marriage certificate in New Orleans, an entry in the census rolls. This is his story, reconstructed from the record.

For readers of Outlander, Pachinko, and The Name of the Rose.

Book One of The 14th Colony series.

Book One: The Struggles of a Young Frenchman to Reach the Louisiana Colony (1720)
Book Two: The Wilderness Takes Root (1720-1729)
Book Three: The Ground That Holds (1729-1769)
Book Four: What the River Keeps (1769-1803)

Books One and Two are available now. Books Three and Four are written and forthcoming.

"Fiction Meets Family History in Mayeux's Louisiana Saga" - The Marksville Weekly News / Bunkie Record

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