El Dorado: An Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel

The Scarlet Pimpernel returns, and this time the stakes are impossibly high. The young Dauphin, heir to the French throne, sits in the Tower of Paris, awaiting the guillotine. No one dares attempt what seems impossible: smuggling the child prince out from under Robespierre's nose. No one, that is, except the mysterious Englishman who hides behind a flower sigil and a laughably public reputation as a foppish dilettante. Sir Percy Blakeney leads his league of daring aristocrats into the heart of revolutionary France once more, matching wits with the scheming Citizen Chauvelin while Armand St. Just provides steadfast support. The Reign of Terror's blade hangs over every scene, but the Pimpernel's golden hour always comes at midnight. This is adventure fiction at its most exuberant: sword fights in moonlit gardens, hidden passages, narrow escapes, and the delicious tension of a disguise nearly blown. Baroness Orczy writes with the confidence of someone who invented a genre, and the romance of the masked hero rescuing innocents from political slaughter has never felt more vital.