London, 1817: Under the cover of darkness, a cloaked stranger steals into the city. He has a job to do: a task that began in a shadowy past. It is going to be difficult. But then murder always is....On that same evening, London's beau monde is celebrating amid the splendor that is Glenister House. The Napoleonic Wars are finally at an end, and Mélanie and Charles Fraser, one of society's most intriguing couples, have traded the moment -to -moment dangers of war for the elegance of the British aristocracy.

Mélanie, a war bride, is an amateur on these civilized battlefields, where age-old alliances intertwine like melodies in a Mozart opera and carnality pulses just beneath a veneer with the sugar-coated beauty of a Fragonard painting.

Charles, a diplomat and intelligence agent during the war, is now a fast-rising Member of Parliament. He seems completely at ease in the world to which he was born, but Mélanie feels her husband has become a polite stranger.

Enter Honoria Talbot, the woman everyone expected Charles to marry. She would have made him a perfect wife -- as polished as sterling, as cool as marble.... On this evening the party assembled at Glenister House hears a shocking announcement: Honoria is indeed marrying a Fraser, but it's not Charles -- it's Charles's father.

This, however, is not the only stunning revelation of the evening. Beneath the glow of a silent moon, a hooded woman smuggles Charles and Mélanie a message from a former compatriot -- meet him tomorrow night at the terrace overlooking the river, off Somerset Place. At twelve o'clock....

The Frasers are swept back into their life of intrigue. Their investigation takes them from a crumbling Thames-side terrace to Charles's ancestral estate on the coast of Scotland . . . and it touches not only Charles's ruthless father and tormented sister, but also the seemingly perfect Honoria. They follow a trail of clues that leads back to the French Revolution and an underground organization called the Elsinore League.

The stakes in this game are high: the lives of those Charles holds most dear and the trust of the woman with whom he shares his life. For the web of lies he and Mélanie discover spans generations and threatens the fate of nations. And the truth is a deadly weapon that can lead to scandal, tragedy ... and murder.