The third and final volume of James Grant's Victorian epic thrusts Florian MacIan into the burning veldt of Zululand, where he pursues the assassins of his friend Vivian Hammersley through landscapes as treacherous as his grief. Each mile of chase deepens his wound and sharpens his need for reckoning. Meanwhile, half a world away, Dulcie Carlyon wages a different kind of war at Craigengowan: against Lady Fettercairn's cold cruelty and the suffocating advances of her predatory relative Shafto. Confined and controlled, she plots her escape with the same desperation that drives Florian's hunt across alien terrain. Their parallel struggles toward freedom converge in a climactic resolution that proves love, too, can be an act of rebellion. Grant's achievement lies in showing how both the colonizer and the colonized, the wealthy lady and the dependent niece, can find themselves equally trapped by forces larger than themselves.
