Sebastian St. Cyr must confront a savage killer and save his closest friend from the hangman’s noose in this heart-pounding new historical mystery from the USA Today bestselling author of When Blood Lies . June 1815. The people of London wait breathlessly for news as Napoléon and the forces united against him hurtle toward their final reckoning at Waterloo. Among them is Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, frustrated to find himself sidelined while recovering from a dangerous wound he recently received in Paris. When the mutilated corpse of Major Miles Sedgewick surfaces from the murky waters of the Thames, Sebastian is drawn into the murder investigation, which threatens one of his oldest and dearest friends, Irish surgeon Paul Gibson. Gibson’s lover, Alexi Sauvage, was tricked into a bigamous marriage with the victim. But there are other women who may have wanted the cruel, faithless major dead. His mistress, his neglected wife, and their young governess whom he seduced all make for compelling suspects. Even more interesting to Sebastian is one of Sedgewick’s fellow officers, a man who shared Sedgewick’s macabre interest in both old English folklore and the occult. And then there’s the valuable list of Londoners who once spied for Napoléon that Sedgewick was said to be transporting to Charles, Lord Jarvis, the Regent’s powerful cousin, who also happens to be Sebastian’s own father-in-law. The deeper Sebastian delves into Sedgewick’s life, the more he learns about the Major’s many secrets, and the list of people who could have wanted him dead grows even longer. Soon others connected to Sedgewick begin to die strange, brutal deaths, and more evidence emerges that links Alexi to the crimes. Certain that Gibson will be implicated alongside his lover, Sebastian finds himself in a desperate race against time to stop the killings and save his friends from the terror of the gallows. “Harris does her usual superior job of combining a page-turning fair-play plot with plausible period detail. Both series fans and newcomers will be captivated.” — Publishers Weekly starred review “St. Cyr fans will relish Harris' commitment to historical accuracy in both political and physical details… This is top-notch historical crime storytelling.” — Booklist C. S. Harris is the USA Today bestselling author of more than twenty-five novels, including the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries; as C. S. Graham, a thriller series coauthored by former intelligence officer Steven Harris; and seven award-winning historical romances written under the name Candice Proctor. Chapter 1 London Tuesday, 13 June 1815 T he dead man smelled like fish. Rotting fish. Pale, bloodless, and faceless, he lay on the stained granite slab in the center of Paul Gibson's ancient stone outbuilding, filling the small room with a foul stench. But then, bodies pulled from the Thames did have a nasty tendency to reek of fish. Fish, brine, tar, and-if it was warm and they'd been in the water long enough-decay. The outbuilding stood at the base of a newly planted garden that stretched out behind the medieval Tower Hill house where Gibson kept his surgery, and he paused now in the doorway to suck in one last breath of fresh, rose-scented air before entering the room. The morning was damp and chilly, the sky a low, menacing gray, the ache from Gibson's truncated left leg sharp enough that he winced as he limped forward. Irish by birth, he was thinner than he should have been and younger than he looked, his dark hair already heavily laced with gray, the long grooves that bracketed his mouth dug deep. Pain had a way of doing that to a man-pain and the opium he used to control it. There'd been a time not so long ago when he'd served as a surgeon with His Majesty's 25 Light Dragoons, honing his understanding of the human body on the bloody battlefields of Europe. Then a French cannonball tore away the lower part of his leg, and though he'd tried to keep going, in the end the phantom pains from that vanished limb became too much. And so he'd come here, to London, to open this humble surgery in the shadow of the Tower, share his knowledge of anatomy at the city's teaching hospitals, and conduct postmortems like this one for the local officials. But lately there were times, such as this morning, when the demands of even that simple routine could come close to overwhelming him. The lingering effects of yesterday's generous dose of opium had left him shaky and clumsy, and he found it took him three tries with a flint before he managed to light a lantern against the gloom and hang it from the chain suspended over the stone slab. The swaying golden light played over the ghostly flesh and shattered face of the unidentified corpse before him and cast macabre shadows across the room's bare stone walls in a way he did not like. Tall, well-formed, and probably somewhere in his thirties, the dead man had been delivered just after dawn by a couple of constables from the Th