Fire Sword and Sea (William Morrow) by Vanessa Riley draws on the purported real-life legacy of seventeenth-century pirate Jacquotte Delahaye. American-Trinidadian Riley focuses on Delahaye’s extraordinary life and times, highlighting her gender-concealing efforts as pivotal to her swashbuckling fame. A cast of formidable women pirates is assembled, each of whom carries her own secrets, and their adventures as a unit are marked by profit, amorous love, and hard-won sisterhood. Fire Sword and Sea vividly imagines people who could very well have been real, operating in a time when living truly as themselves bore catastrophic consequences.