Robert Hilliard’s first historical novel, In Freedom’s Shadow, is one of those gripping, fast-paced stories that quite literally leaves you breathless in the opening sentence and holds you on for the duration until the very end.

Hilliard, a western Pennsylvania native, wrote his first book, A Season on the Allegheny, 12 years ago to national acclaim for his superb chronicling of a year spent hunting in the Allegheny National Forest. His adventures tracking deer, grouse, and turkey immersed the reader into the majesty of Pennsylvania’s only national forest and served as a perfect primer to immersing the reader into the life of John Scobell, a slave during the Civil War who found a way to flee the Confederacy only then to make the fateful decision to return to the South as a spy for the Union.