The Reckoning
The year is 1777, and the northern frontier of New York burns with rebellion and betrayal. Carus Renault serves as secretary to a powerful loyalist, moving through British-controlled society with practiced ease. But beneath his compliant exterior lies a dangerous secret: he is a spy for the Continental Army, his double life a constant tightrope walk between survival and ruin. When he isn't passing intelligence to the revolutionary cause, he must hide his true allegiances from friends, colleagues, and the woman he loves. The war has divided families, shattered loyalties, and forced ordinary men to become something more or less than themselves. Chambers constructs a world where trust is a currency more precious than gold, and a single misstep means the gallows. The novel pulses with the paranoia and moral weight of espionage, asking what loyalty truly means when every side claims righteousness. For readers who crave historical fiction that treats the Revolutionary War as something more than patriotic pageantry, this is a story of compromised ideals, impossible choices, and the quiet heroism of those who chose the losing side because they believed in something.
Editions
X-Ray
“Iacocca made his pitch: He wanted Ford to build the Fiesta, but with a Honda engine and transmission in it. Honda was delighted: He would like nothing better than this joint production with an American company, whose very name he revered. The price of the Japanese parts would be only $711. He could deliver 300,000 and do it quickly. Iacocca was even more delighted; he had an instant car and an unbeatable one at that. It could be in the dealers’ showrooms in only eighteen months.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“The fury with which Japan unleashed itself upon international trade, the kind of economic Darwinism that was at the center of its impulse, originally came not just from each company’s desire to conquer the world but from its desire to take market share away from domestic competitors. In Japan there was always someone ready to undersell someone else, and there was always someone on the edge of bankruptcy.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, “There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“In 1953, at the beginning of the Eisenhower era and the glory years of the auto industry, Hudson’s had done $153 million in retail sales; in 1981 the downtown Hudson’s had done only $44 million”
— Robert W. Chambers
“When, in the immediate postwar era, someone at Chrysler had designed a smaller, low-slung car, K. T. Keller, the company’s top executive, had mocked it. “Chrysler builds cars to sit in,” he said, “not to piss over.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“It reflected the belief that a largely uncontrolled capitalism such as existed in America might be ruinous for Japan, that without sufficient controls too few men would become too rich in too poor a nation. That would create intolerable tensions and divisions, so the state and the capitalists themselves had to regulate it.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“Nothing appalled Deming more than the idea of the interchangeable manager. “What is the motivation and purpose of men like this?” he would say with contempt. “Do they even know what they do anymore? What do they produce?” All they knew about was numbers, not product. All they thought about was maximum profit, not excellence of product.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“Nissan asked him to make an estimate of what it would cost to run the plant. When he finished it, he typed it up, signed it, and”
— Robert W. Chambers
“His counterpart at Chevy, a man named Bill Holler, had once gathered all of his regional salesmen around a brand-new model, opened the door, looked at them all long and solemnly, and then slammed the door as hard as he could. “Boys,” he announced, “I’ve just slammed the door on the best goddam car in the world””
— Robert W. Chambers
