In an east Texas cemetery outside the town of Elza an elderly Gemma Crawford lays a pot of flowers on the grave of Jesse Rose. Seventy-five years earlier twelve-year-old Gemma sat high above Elza on a Ferris wheel with young Jesse, knowing even then that he would be the love of her life. But, as they sat there, the happenings on the midway below results in Jesse having to hide a body and a secret that will alter the course of their young lives.
Five years later Jesse’s best friend, Cliff Tidwell, is found brutally murdered and Jesse must stand trial for his death. To save him from the electric chair legendary Texas Ranger Brewster McKinney, police chief Jefferson Hightower, and an old buffalo soldier known as Cherokee-one-leg must untangle a web of clues that stretch over fifty years and involve corrupt businessmen, Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, small town gangsters, and a back woods bordello.
But the one clue that can set Jesse free is a secret he refuses to reveal, the secret of the summer of ’36 and how the events of that summer caused what happened That Night at the Palace.
In the spring of 1814 at the young age of seventeen Ephraim Bradford deserts from the British Army to begin a new life in America.
When his ship to the New World is commandeered by privateers Ephraim becomes an indentured servant to the pirate empire commanded by Captain Jean Lafitte. Soon Ephraim, a merchant by training, begins managing the sale of Lafitte’s stolen goods on the streets of New Orleans. The same day that Ephraim lands in America, a thousand miles away in the bustling city of Baltimore, Charlotte Fuller reluctantly marries a swindler twice her age and boards a ship to the Gulf coast.
After her foolhardy husband is killed, she is left starving and alone on the streets of the Crescent City. Desperate and near death, the only way she can find to survive is by taking a job in a Bourbon Street bordello. Pirates or Patriots follows a young British merchant from the cold fields of Shropshire England to the warm waters of the Mississippi delta and a young farm girl from the cool shores of the Chesapeake Bay to the gritty underbelly of the French Quarter. On a sunny summer afternoon, the two fall in love only to have their passions torn apart by their secret lives and the looming Battle of New Orleans.
