Pawn to King's End

He was fourteen when the British burned his world to ash. What followed wasn’t survival. It was transformation. In Pawn to King’s End, author Douglas A. Gosselin unearths the rarely told story of the Acadian Expulsion of 1755 through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Clément Gosselin, whose family is violently torn from their Nova Scotian homeland by British forces. Separated from his parents in the chaos, Clément flees into the Canadian wilderness with his brothers. Their escape leads them to the harsh frontier of Quebec, where survival depends on fragile alliances with the indigenous Mi’kmaq and the endurance only exile can forge. Meanwhile, Clément’s parents, Gabriel and Marie, are deported to Sullivan’s Island off the coast of South Carolina—an ordeal grounded in historical record. Marie eventually travels alone to New Orleans, where she rebuilds a life from ruin, becoming a quiet emblem of perseverance in a foreign land. Years later, Clément crosses paths with the enigmatic Mr. Smith, a shadowy spymaster with ties to General Washington. Under Smith’s tutelage, Clément evolves from a displaced refugee into a covert courier for the Continental Army, risking his life to smuggle intelligence through war-torn colonies in service of an emerging revolution. Meticulously researched and powerfully told, Pawn to King’s End blends historical fidelity with deeply human storytelling. It sheds light on overlooked episodes of American and Canadian history—the forced deportation of Acadians, the Mi’kmaq’s role in frontier diplomacy, and the hidden contributions of French-speaking operatives to Washington’s war effort. Gosselin’s narrative foregrounds the forgotten actors of revolution—those whose names never reached the ledgers but whose sacrifices shaped the republic’s survival. A sweeping, emotionally grounded tale of resilience, espionage, and cultural survival, Pawn to King’s End gives voice to the silent architects of liberty.

The Doctrine of Shadows

In Doctrine of Shadows, Douglas A. Gosselin delivers a brooding, intricately layered historical thriller set against the fraught backdrop of a young American republic teetering on the edge of fragmentation. As war looms in 1809, and trust corrodes beneath the surface of power, the Doctrine—a clandestine network of operatives sworn to uphold the nation’s fragile unity—moves in silence. At the center is Mr. Smith, a shadowy strategist haunted by a vow made in Revolutionary-era England, and Cyrus, his loyal but fractured protégé navigating a moral labyrinth from New York to Vermont. When a betrayal from within shatters the Doctrine’s internal compass, a ripple of silence, violence, and concealed truths begins to spread—from Tecumseh’s resistance in the western frontier to the streets of Lisbon, London, and the halls of Monticello. Through richly imagined and historically grounded scenes, Gosselin explores espionage, disunionist plots, and the emotional weight carried by those tasked with preserving a republic too young to know itself. Real figures—Thomas Jefferson, William Henry Harrison, John Bellingham, and Peter Augustus Jay—appear alongside operatives like Talia, Alina, and Camille, whose loyalty is not to politics, but to the fragile architecture of truth. As the Doctrine faces its greatest test, its agents must reckon with a central question: how much silence is justice worth? Blending historical authenticity with literary precision, Doctrine of Shadows is a meditation on the cost of nationhood, the erasure of inconvenient truths, and the unseen figures who shaped America not through fame, but through sacrifice. It is both an espionage novel and an elegy for what is lost when history is written only by the victors.