Count Hannibal: A Romance of the Court of France

The court of Catherine de' Medici is a snake pit, and the young Huguenot woman who finds herself at its center has everything to lose. When she catches the eye of Count Hannibal de Tavannes, a Catholic nobleman whose charm masks a predator's ambitions, she becomes trapped between his unwanted attention and the king's secret commands. As the bells of Paris begin to ring on a summer night in 1572, the air fills with something far more dangerous than romance: the signal for massacre. Weyman weaves a tale of survival amid the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, where religious tolerance is a death sentence and loyalty is a currency that fluctuates with every courtly whisper. The novel pulses with the danger of a world where polished manners conceal murderous intent, and where one woman's struggle to stay alive becomes a window into an era of extraordinary violence and intrigue. For readers who crave historical fiction that treats the sixteenth century as something other than costume drama, this is Weyman at his considerable best.