The King's Scapegoat

The fire that consumes Solignac is no accident. When Gaspard de Helville rides home after years of diminishing fortunes, he finds his ancestral estate reduced to ash and his beloved Babette dead in the ruins, killed by the rogue Jan Meert. Everything he has lost, everything taken from him, now propels him toward Paris and the treacherous world of the royal court. A man with nothing left to lose becomes the king's envoy, thrust into a web of political machinations where every word carries weight and every alliance masks betrayal. Hamilton Drummond constructs his narrative with the muscular clarity of early 20th-century storytelling, grounding political intrigue in raw human emotion: the grief of a man who has lost his home, the fierce loyalty of a servant who questions his master's choices, the slow burning of revenge that might be justice or damnation. This is historical fiction that understands loss is not merely an ending but a beginning. For readers who savor the genre's golden age, where character emerges from action and consequence, The King's Scapegoat delivers a tale of survival, redemption, and the high cost of climbing back from ruin.