Cirrus@Austlit

'It's 1763. Career diplomat Alec Halsey returns to London and the shocking news his estranged elder brother, the Earl of Delvin, has not only killed his friend in a duel but become engaged to the woman he had hoped to marry. To learn more about the suspect duel, Alec reluctantly attends a weekend house party to celebrate his brother's engagement. House guests get more than they bargained for when a lady's maid is murdered, the bride-to-be attacked, and a guest is shot dead. Alec uncovers a connection between these sinister acts and his brother's duel. He must also confront a cruel twist of fate that explains why his brother loathes him and will go to any lengths to discredit him in Polite Society.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Career diplomat Alec Halsey has been elevated to a marquessate he doesn't want and Polite Society believes he doesn't deserve; his lover has decided she won't marry him after all and the suspicion he murdered his brother still lingers in London drawing rooms. So returning to London after seven months' seclusion may have been a mistake.

'Alec's foreboding deepens when a nobody vicar drops dead at a party-political dinner; he witnesses the very public humiliation of an up and coming portrait painter, and his rabble-rousing uncle Plantagenet is bashed and left for dead in a laneway. When the vicar's true identity is revealed, Alec suspects the man was poisoned. But who would want a seemingly harmless man of God murdered, and why?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Autumn 1763. Alec, Lord Halsey is sent on a diplomatic mission to Midanich, imperial outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, to bargain for the freedom of imprisoned friends. Midanich is a place of great danger and dark secrets, a country at civil war ruled by a family with madness in its veins. For Alec it is a place of unspeakable memories from which he barely escaped and vowed never to return. But return he must, if he is to save the lives of Emily St. Neots and Sir Cosmo Mahon.

In a race against time, Alec and the English delegation journey across the icy wasteland for the castle fortress where Emily and Cosmo are imprisoned. The severe winter weather is as much an enemy as the soldiers of the opposing armies encamped along the way. Awaiting him at his destination is the Margrave and his sister, demanding nothing less than Alec’s head on a pike. ' (Publication summary)