On the Fourth of July, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence. That’s not fiction. That’s the historical record, and it’s the kind of coincidence a thriller writer can’t leave alone.

The Jefferson Allegiance starts there. Jefferson, dying at Monticello, discharges one final duty—and the man he summons to his deathbed is a young Edgar Allan Poe. From that night forward, a hidden document has kept the balance between the presidency and the republic, guarded by a handful of people who’d rather die than surrender it. Some have.

The Jefferson Allegiance is free until the 14th.

The history underneath the book is real. The Society of the Cincinnati was founded in 1783, with Alexander Hamilton a leading member, and plenty of the founders feared it was the seed of an American aristocracy. Jefferson opposed a standing army his whole career—and then established West Point in 1802. That contradiction nagged at me for years. I graduated from West Point, and I wrote this book partly to work out why the man who distrusted armies built the Academy.

Of course, my answer is a thriller, not a dissertation. There are points in it people can and will argue, because history is not an absolute.

Download it. Read the history notes in the front of The Jefferson Allegiance before the story. Then think if it would have worked as per the examples scattered in the text.