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Tracy Grant made a stunning debut with Daughter of the
Game, a suspenseful novel that lifted the curtain on the
glittering world of Regency London, revealing a maze of
intrigue and scandal, and introduced Charles and Mélanie
Fraser -- a fascinating couple whose private lives are at
odds with their public image. Now Grant returns with a
sweeping new novel that explores the Frasers' partnership
in adventure. 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.
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