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In a life stranger than any fiction, Grace O�Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of plundering, kidnapping, murder and mayhem came to a close in 1586, when she was captured and sentenced to hang. Saved from the scaffold by none other than Queen Elizabeth herself � another powerful woman in a man�s world � Grace�s life took another extraordinary turn, when it was rumoured she had become intelligencer for the queen�s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Was this the price of her freedom? Judith Cook explores this and other questions about the life and times of this remarkable woman in a fascinating, thrilling and impeccably researched book.