Reluctant hero Martin Jerrold returns in his second swashbuckling adventure in the vein of Flashman and Sharpe.

July 1806: Commanding a prison-hulk in the Medway, guarding French captives, Martin Jerrold thinks his war can’t get much better. He is far away from storm, battle and the other disagreeable elements of naval life. He can even keep his mistress, Isobel, close at hand. It seems too good to last. And so it proves.

When one of the prisoners, Dumont, goes missing, Jerrold’s comfortable world is turned upside down. He is ordered by the First Lord of the Admiralty to recapture the Frenchman at any cost. Jerrold doesn’t know it but the pursuit will take him clear across England: from the slums of London to the wilds of Dartmoor, to the newly fashionable resort of Brighton. But who is the mysterious Monsieur Dumont? Everyone is curious about him, from his old friend Mr Nevell to politicians of all stripes — even the seductive Princess Caroline takes an unexpected interest.

As Jerrold, with his usual mix of bad timing and bad behaviour, closes on his quarry, he begins to uncover an extraordinary tangle of deceit and treachery stretching back twenty years, which reaches to the most exalted levels of society on both sides of the Channel. And which some men will stop at nothing to conceal.