On a humid day in June 1806, on the edge of Ohio's Great Black Swamp, seventeen-year-old Susanna Quiner watches from behind a tree as a band of Potawatomi Indians kidnaps her four older sisters from their cabin. With both her parents dead from Swamp Fever and all the other settlers out in their fields, Susanna rashly decides to pursue them herself. What follows is a young woman's quest to find her sisters, and the parallel story of her sisters' new lives. Over the next five months, Susanna tans hides in a Moravian missionary village; escapes down a river with a young native girl; discovers an eccentric white woman raising chickens in the middle of the Great Black Swamp; and becomes a servant in a Wyandot village longhouse. The man who loves her, Seth Spendlove, is in pursuit after he realizes that his father was involved in the kidnapping. Part Potawatomi himself but living a white man's life, Seth unwittingly sets off on his own quest to reclaim his heritage. He allies himself with a Potawatomi named Koman, one of the band of men who originally abducted the Quiner sisters, but who now wishes to make his own retribution. Together they canoe through the Black Swamp and into enemy territory looking for Susanna, and while they travel Koman teaches Seth about their shared heritage. As Susanna makes her way through Thieving Forest and across the Great Black Swamp, she transforms into a capable woman who endures starvation, snakebite, and leech-infested waters in order to find her family. And against all odds she does find them, although they too have changed: one has found religion, one has fallen in love with a Native American and lives with his family, and one has been sold to a brutal backwoodsman. Both a quest tale and a tale of personal transformations, Thieving Forest follows an eclectic set of characters tackling the wildness of life in frontier America. Fast-paced, richly detailed, with a panoramic view of cultures and people, this is a story of a bygone era sure to enthrall and delight.