The Copy

Well, here's what we have so far. It still needs some tweaking (that first sentence just isn't right), but it's a huge improvement on what was there before. Did I mention these things are always done on a rush, with a deadline of anywhere from one to twelve hours?

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That’s the challenge confronting C.S. Harris’s aristocratic soldier-turned-sleuth Sebastian St. Cyr when his friend, surgeon and “anatomist” Paul Gibson, buys the cadaver of a young man from London’s infamous body snatchers. A rising star at the Foreign Office, Mr. Alexander Ross was reported to have died of a weak heart. But when Gibson discovers a stiletto wound at the base of Ross’s skull, he can only turn to Sebastian for help in catching the killer.

Described by all who knew him as an amiable young man, Ross at first seems an unlikely candidate for murder. But as Sebastian’s search for the killer takes him from the Queen’s drawing rooms in St. James’s Palace to the embassies of Russia, the fledgling United States, and the Turkish Empire, he plunges into a dangerous shadow land of diplomatic maneuvering and international intrigue, where truth is an elusive commodity and nothing is as it seems.

At the same time, Sebastian must confront the turmoil of his personal life. Hero Jarvis, daughter of Sebastian’s powerful nemesis Lord Jarvis, finally agrees to become his wife. But as their wedding approaches, Sebastian can’t escape the growing realization that both Jarvis and Hero know far more about the events surrounding Ross’s death than they would have him believe.

Then a second body is found, badly decomposed but bearing the same fatal stiletto wound. And Sebastian must race to unmask a ruthless killer who has now become a threat to the life of his reluctant bride and their still unborn child.