The Gardens of the King

About the Book

Ben Franklin, the ambassador to France, and Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, have been kidnapped! George Washington sends Colonels Hamilton and Burr, Captain Adlum, and secret agent 351, Elizabeth Schuyler, to France, and they meet up with Beaumarchais, the king’s right-hand man, in wild pursuit across Bavaria. All this time, Franklin has been having an affair with Marie Antoinette in a castle in Bavaria, who is part of a Europe-wide plot to stop the American War of Independence, a position very much at odds with her husband’s. But Franklin, held against his will in a castle in Bavaria, is too clever for the best minds of Europe and breaks free of his captors in a balloon chase across the Black Forest. All along, the king of France has been having marital problems, and in the end, Ben reunites the king and queen, and America gets its funding from the king for the war of independence, now in its second year.

About the Author

Andrew Glenn is a true Renaissance man, having made significant contributions to the arts in theater, literature, and music in his forty-five-year career. He is mentioned in Annette Lust’s From the Greek Mimes to Marcel Marceau and Beyond, and his poetry has appeared in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Winning Hearts and Minds: An Anthology of Vietnam War Era Poets. In the ’80s, after a career in modern dance, he established the Mime Theater of Andrew Glenn in Seattle, Washington. His creations had appeared in the Moscow Festival for the Arts in 1990, and he has appeared on TV in California and Washington and performed in the choreography of Martha Graham. Returning to singing, his first love, he established House of Song, giving over six hundred recitals. In 2001, he sang German lieder for the German cultural attaché to the UN in Philadelphia. Gardens of the King is his second novel. He lives half the year in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the other half in Marburg, Germany, where he is an active translator of German poetry.