Past Dispatches
Each issue: the real history behind the books, plus what's coming next.
Latest
October 9, 2026
In 1717 the king offered a full pardon to any pirate who surrendered by a set date. No trial, no conditions. Hundreds of them took it, and Blackbeard was one. What happened to the men who signed is the strangest part.
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September 25, 2026
Eight hundred and sixty-seven feet of grey-green rock standing alone above the Belle Fourche River. Geologists have been arguing about how Devils Tower got there since the 1880s. Four theories, a hundred and forty years, and a federal survey that says plainly no conclusive proof can be presented.
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September 10, 2026
Blackbeard’s flagship sits in about twenty feet of water off North Carolina. Divers have been bringing her up since 1996 with no treasure aboard. So where did we all get the idea that pirates buried gold and drew maps with an X on them?
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August 28, 2026
The Confederacy trusted its orders to a cipher it believed unbreakable. Three young men in a telegraph office were already reading them. Includes a Vigenère cipher to crack yourself, and signed hardcovers for the readers who do.
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August 11, 2026
A U.S. ambassador spied for forty years and it took a federal indictment to catch him. So how does something outlive every person who built it?
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August 4, 2026
Six weeks after the first battle of the Civil War, a Georgia colonel’s own men raised a marble monument where he fell on Henry Hill. Within a year it had vanished, and no one has ever settled who took it. What stands there today was placed in 1936, and it does not quite tell the truth.
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July 28, 2026
July 21, 1861. Families rode out from Washington with picnic baskets to watch the North win the Civil War in a single afternoon. What they watched instead was the belief in a short war die on the field at Manassas.
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July 21, 2026
A cipher carried home from the Civil War turns into something a great deal larger than a treasure hunt. The prologue and the first six chapters of Knights of the Golden Circle are free to read.
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July 3, 2026
The full Knights of the Golden Circle prologue, published here before anyone else saw it.
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June 24, 2026
On June 24, 1755, Braddock’s flying column was hacking toward Fort Duquesne while George Washington lay sick at Bear Camp, desperate not to miss it. Fifteen days later: the Monongahela.
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Issue 03
June 16, 2026
From Braddock’s lost gold in 1755 to a Confederate cipher network in 1864, the patient ones never stopped.
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Issue 02
May 2026
Angel Studios releases Young Washington. Andy Serkis plays General Braddock. The film follows the same campaign, the same forest, the same disaster that starts the hunt in Echoes of Fortune.
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Issue 01
April 2026
About ten years ago, I was kayaking the Youghiogheny River when a stranger on the bank told me he was searching for Braddock's gold. That moment crystallized everything, and led to a story I had promised someone very important I would write.
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Issue 00
Welcome Dispatch
New here? Start with this one. It’s the map of the whole world: the novels, the free short stories, and the one restricted file I keep off the shelf.
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