Secret codes. Secret agents. Double agents. Spies. Thomas B. Allen’s fascinating account of the intrigue, intelligence, and operatives on both sides of the Revolutionary War paints a clear, cogent portrait of the colonists’ superiority in the spy game. George Washington’s intelligence network was sophisticated, structured so that no individual, even Washington himself, knew too much. It was supplemented by colonists like Lydia Darragh, who provided unsolicited secrets to aid in the fight for independence. Darragh transmitted what she overheard British officers saying by hiding scraps of paper, written in family code, inside cloth-covered buttons. She sewed the buttons onto the coat of her 14-year-old son, who passed them onto his older brother, a lieutenant in Washington’s army. Showing how courage and deceit on both sides of the intelligence fight often had a direct impact on battlefield outcomes, George Washington, Spymaster reveals a critical component of the United States’s victory over Britain. This wholly engaging volume is intimately sized to look like a secret codebook. (Ages 8–13)