Setting The Messenger (Bethany House) during the Revolutionary War posed a number of challenges for Siri Mitchell. Writing about the escape of patriot soldiers from a British prison in May, 1778, she explains, “I was able to find out the date that it happened, how many prisoners escaped, and a mention of the patriot lines participating in a diversionary skirmish, but the link between the Continental Army—who had to have planned the escape—and the prisoners has been lost to time. I finally decided that if I couldn’t turn anything up, no one else would probably be able to either. At that point, I gave my novelist self permission to ‘make stuff up’!”
