Ayleswick-on-Teme, 1813. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, has come to this seemingly peaceful Shropshire village both to honor a slain friend and on a quest to learn more about his own ancestry. But when the body of a young widow is found on the banks of the River Teme, a bottle of laudanum at her side, the village's inexperienced new magistrate asks Sebastian for help. Sebastian quickly realizes that Emma Chance did not kill herself. As Sebastian and his wife Hero discover, Emma was hiding both her true identity and her real reasons for traveling to Ayleswick. Sebastian finds out that Emma was not the first--or even the second--young woman in the village to die under suspicious circumstances. Home to the ruins of an ancient monastery, Ayleswick is a dark and dangerous place of secrets--and has a violent past that may be connected to Sebastian's own unsettling origins. Sebastian St. Cyr is drawn into a murder investigation in a deceptively peaceful English village in this gripping historical mystery from the national bestselling author of Why Kill the Innocent. Ayleswick-on-Teme, 1813. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, and his wife, Hero, have come to this deceptively peaceful Shropshire village to honor a slain friend. But when the body of a young widow is found on the banks of the river Teme, the village's inexperienced new magistrate turns to Sebastian for help. Sebastian soon realizes that Emma Chance was hiding her true identity, and she was not the first beautiful young woman in the village to be murdered. Also troubling are the machinations of Lucien Bonaparte, the estranged brother of the megalomaniac French Emperor Napoleon. Held captive under the British government's watchful eye, Bonaparte is restless, ambitious, and treacherous. Home to the eerie ruins of an ancient monastery, Ayleswick reveals itself to be a dark and dangerous place with a violent past that may be connected to Sebastian's own unsettling origins. And as he faces his most diabolical opponent ever, he is forced to consider what malevolence he's willing to embrace in order to destroy a killer.