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Thaddeus Baxter Kaymus and The Queens' Gift

“This is a mistake!”  The words of Thaddeus Baxter Kaymus, a Yankee transplanted to the South by marriage, when he learned that he had been assigned to teach a course on Southern Culture at the private college in North Carolina where he was employed.  That mistake led to another, don’t they always, which resulted in his learning about the possibility of a secret gift sent in 1863 from England’s Queen Victoria to the Confederacy’s President Davis with the intent of manipulating the outcome of the Civil War and thus the history of the world.  When Dr. Kaymus casually follows up on the potential gift he discovers it’s history parallels uncomfortably close to a secret, of the “dirty little” kind, that runs in his own family. 
 
The Queens’ Gift follows Dr. Kaymus’ search for lost treasure and truth which leads him across the southeastern United States, into Mexico, and across the Gulf of Mexico to the Bahamas.  Kaymus and his elite team of untrained and inexperienced, assistants, reluctantly join forces with the US Navy, the CIA, an almost over the hill Native American tracker with a Mexican passport, a handful of museums geeks, Mexican padres, and a tour boat captain as they follow one unlikely clue after another from deserted cemeteries to church attics and museum basements to an uninhabited island, all the while outrunning  their sometimes evil competition, out guessing the historical experts, out believing almost everyone they meet, and out politicing the Cuban and South African governments. 

With the help of his teenage daughter, Charlie who initially only goes along because she doesn’t’ have anything better to do and Ben Nichols, a graduate student who pays for his books by giving walking tours of Charleston, Dr. Kaymus is able to discover the truth about the Queen’s Gift and his own family, and then, with the added assistance of England’s Queen Elizabeth he is able to accomplish something that neither Queen Victoria nor any of the military or political leaders he meets along the way were able to complete.  

                                                         It is a tale of family and strangers, friends and enemies, queens and generals, soldiers and war,
                                                                    honor and treason, and a search for treasure and truth.  If that isn’t enough, it is possible
                                                                                                                   that the whole thing actually happened.


Next in the series:
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Thaddeus Baxter Kaymus and the Pirates Cove
It may not have been a mistake this time, but it certainly wasn't intentional either.  But Thaddeus and a new team of untrained and inexperienced assistants  go in search of Black Beard's lost treasure.  Did it ever exist?  Is there anything left?  Where would it be?  How does any of those answer help explain how Thaddeus' family arrived in the USA

Coming soon...

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