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SCOUNDRELS' BRIGADE by Carter A. Vaughan

SCOUNDRELS' BRIGADE

By

Pub Date: Jan. 12th, 1961
Publisher: Doubleday

During the War of Independence, in an attempt to wreck her rebelling colony, Merry England turned out bushels of false Continental dollars. In Scoundrels' Brigade the secret struggle which then ensued between the Redcoat underground and America's first counterspies is given the grand old operatic treatment with a slap-dashing hero, pace-setting villains and a flashy heroine. Like most costume melodramas, this is short on credibility but awfully long when it comes to frilly romance, colorful adventure and intricate plotting. Huge Spencer, an English Captain, due to a trumped-up charge of counterfeiting, gets shipped to the New World as an indentured slave. Later, after reading the Declaration of Independence, he flees North, meets General Washington, learns of Britain's false currency plan and is commissioned to undo it via a thief-to-catch-thief stratagem. Thus into his ken returns the red-haired wench who had been the cause of all his original troubles. Using the lass and her canny dad, a pair of expert crooks, masterful Hugh breaks up His Majesty's minting plant ensconced aboard an East River frigate, leads his wayward friends to the paths of virtue and happily loses his heart to the prettiest of them. A gamy bit of history resurrected in an easy-to-read, hard-to-remember entertainment.