When the Civil War began, no one could have seemed less likely to play a part in it than Belle Boyd. Only 17, she was a model of decorum, the very ideal of Southern womanhood, gay, flirtatious and gentle. Belle passionately loved the South and when her home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley fell to the Union Troops, her career as a secret agent began. Soon she was supplying the Southerners under "Stonewall" Jackson with vital information.

It was a career that was to lead her along a fantastic path of adventure. She came to know the inside of dreaded Union prisons, accusations of spying and murder, betrayals by Union counterspies as her assignments grew more perilous, her exploits more amazing. Time and again she was captured, and time and again fate or fortune or her own bewitching wiles won her release. With nerves of steel and a razor-sharp wit, she was easily the match of her adversaries—and, in one case, far more than a match when a former Union captor followed her on a mission to England, and married her!

Known as the "Southern Joan of Arc," her deeds inspired the South and infuriated the Northern forces who sought to stop her. Her story is a true spy thriller that will capture the imagination.

From the dust jacket