When you play a double game, if you lose... you die.

Tasked by General Napoleon Bonaparte with effecting a perilous entry into the fortress convent of Valletta, Lieutenant Vanderville sides with a renegade Maltese desperate to end the oppressive rule of the Knights of St John.

When his companion is lost, the mission goes from bad to worse as he discovers treachery and murder are stalking the agents he is supposed to be meeting, his only allies.

Caught between the feuding knights, the machinations of the Grand Master and his foes in the Holy Office, Vanderville begins to feel hopelessly unable to find the killer without the sage guidance of his mentor, Felix Gracchus. Will he live to regret his rash decision to part company?

A riotous whodunnit set during the heights of Napoleon's European conquest, for fans of Steven Saylor and S. J. Parris.