'Oh, what a tangled web we weave; when first we practice to deceive...' As the war rages in the New England South West and the Gulf of Spain, political machinations rock the East Coast colonies and far, far away the law of unintended consequences is about to bite the Empire upon which the Sun never sets with a cruel, and oddly, inevitable vengeance. Trapped in the treacherous currents of the machinations of great men, as the tumultuous year of 1978 draws to a calamitous end, Melody Danson and her friends find themselves at the nexus of the gathering storm, fighting for their freedom as the tides of war eddy and flood. In the world in which the American colonies never gained their independence, nothing is simple and the illusory peace of the last century is ever-more just a mirage, as every day another as piece by piece, the world settlement established after the terrible wars of the nineteenth century, crumbles... And just when you think you see a pin-prick of light at the end the tunnel; too late you realise it is an express train thundering down the rails towards you!