The Most Dangerous Weapons Are the People - an Editorial Review of "The Hazard Trade"

Book Blurb:

In British-occupied Newport, Rhode Island, the most dangerous weapons are the people the enemy refuses to see.

Newport, Rhode Island is the crown jewel of the colonies—one of the most beautiful cities, one of the wealthiest, with the finest natural harbor in the new world. Rhode Island is a hotbed of rebellion, and the British have made an example of it: brutally occupying the city, blockading the harbor, and cutting off trade. More than half the population has fled the island, every tree has been cut down to feed the voracious need for firewood, and the British have begun tearing down the houses of those who left for fuel.

William and Mary Hazard have spent their marriage choosing principle over profit: refusing the slave trade, sheltering the vulnerable, building something decent in a city being consumed by British occupation. When soldiers raid their provisions shop and arrest them in front of their children, their careful neutrality is shattered. Survival now demands something far more dangerous than principle.

The Hazard family fights back the only way they can: in the shadows. Mary becomes the architect of a covert intelligence network hidden in plain sight, drawing on the networks women have always maintained—the gossip of officers' wives, the quiet solidarity of those the powerful ignore. William navigates a deadly game of mutual blackmail with British command. Their daughter Bridget, who has been secretly documenting British patrol patterns for two years, finally has someone to give the intelligence to. And their son Benjamin is drawn into a dangerous double game when he catches the eye of a brilliant British counterintelligence officer.

Their allies are as unlikely as they are formidable. Duchess Quamino, an enslaved caterer, risks being torn from her children to spy on British officers from inside their own dining rooms. Her intelligence is a lifeline for her husband, John, a free Black man braving the brutal Atlantic to earn the money to buy his family's liberty. He sails as first officer to Harry Sherman, a dangerous, grieving privateer captain waging a relentless war of vengeance against the empire that murdered his wife.

As a massive French fleet approaches and a catastrophic hurricane threatens to destroy everything, the Hazards and their allies must navigate the razor's edge of espionage.

The Hazard Trade is a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the shadows of history—and of what it truly costs to resist.

Book one in an ongoing series, The Hazard Trade is a historical thriller set in Colonial Newport, Rhode Island. Think Turn: Washington's Spies meets The Alice Network.

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/WOdCGU

Author Bio:

Eric Picard lives in Newport, RI with his wife Erynn in a home called The Conservatory that was built as a Livery Stable in 1680. In a former life, Eric was a commercial boat captain, SCUBA diver, and Lighthouse Keeper. For the last twenty five years he has been a serial entrepreneur and technology leader at various tech companies ranging from those he's started himself and grown, to large companies like Microsoft, Pandora Music and BarkBox. He has degrees in History and Fine Art from the University of Rhode Island, and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati. He describes himself as a husband, a father, a technology catalyst, an artist and a writer. He loves spending time on, in and under the water, and he walks for exercise every day.

Editorial Review:

Title: The Hazard Trade

Author: Eric Picard

Rating: 4.5

Imagine a situation where at fourteen years of age, British soldiers smash through your family shop to arrest your parents for treason, not because they are guilty, but because a trusted individual in the family has been documenting their every move to protect his slave-trading fortune. This is the world Eric Picard’s “The Hazard Trade” drops the reader into. It follows the Hazard family, a family where the father blackmails his betrayer, a mother builds an intelligence network among women you would easily dismiss, and a teenage boy is forced to decide whether to become a double agent in spite of his age.

““He knows,” Bridget whispered. “Knows what?” his father asked, though his face had gone pale. “Whatever’s about to happen. That wasn’t a threat. It was a farewell. He was saying goodbye to the store, to the merchandise, to …” She gestured helplessly. “To the way things used to be.” They didn’t have long to wait.”

This floor-dropping moment makes the reader turn the page holding their breath, desperate to know what happens next. The words “the way things used to be” signals a possible tragedy-heavy occurrence and the mourning of a life that hasn’t technically ended yet. One senses that the words “He was saying goodbye…” even this early, confirms what the novel will spend its length exploring, that these ordinary people are saying farewell to the lives they already knew and the only questioning remaining is what will become of them instead.

“We’re already implicated by someone to the British; if not Thomas, someone set MacReady on us. I suspect it was Joseph Wanton. We can choose to allay the British and convince them we’re not part of the rebellion so that we can just live our lives as best we can. Or we can use this opportunity to be part of this thing, to help it go in the direction we prefer it to turn.”

Here, the reader learns that the family has already lost a shot at innocence and is now facing a dilemma on whether to allay the British, which feels like a fantasy, or be part of a crucial move that can drastically shift them from victims to participants, and possibly to weapons. This is the language of survival, and one that acknowledges that resistance isn’t always noble.

“And now there was a second watcher—or maybe a third? Or maybe there were even more than that! How many people were tracking their movements? How many notebooks contained entries about the Hazard family? How many different investigations were running simultaneously, each one building toward arrest or protection or something William couldn’t yet predict?”

Here, the reader feels the walls closing in as the possibility of watchers who might still be unknown begins to sink in. The moment weaponizes the unknown, even as it hints at an agenda so foreign the reader cannot imagine it taking shape. One feels the suspense suddenly shift into dread, in a world that is just as quickly, getting occupied by shadows of all forms and guesses.

This book moves in a sophisticated pacing. One minute the reader is caught up in slow-burn dread and the next minute they are thrust into sudden violence before again being pulled back by a sudden stillness. Where they expect speed it slows down, and where they expect relief it speeds up, never allowing them to settle into a predictable rhythm. It manages to weaponize the ordinary all while making resistance emerge not as a calling to a bunch of extraordinary people but as what ordinary people do when they decide to keep their eyes open. This aspect, coupled with how it reclaims agency for the people history has rendered invisible, including the enslaved musician who tunes harpsichords while officers plan raids, the mother who builds spy networks from kitchen gossip, and the teenage boy who learns to expertly lie, makes it one of the most outstanding works that moves beyond mere intent.

Eric Picard’s “The Hazard Trade” might feel excessive at first, but that’s because it is building a world where the reader lives inside, rather than just observing from outside. The reader cannot skim through and expect to get the full weight and truth of the struggle. Its length accurately mirrors the texture of ordinary life under occupation. It is for the readers who enjoy historical fiction with an emotional pull, those fascinated by history from below, and those who long to see women exercise power in spaces that deny them agency.

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