The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel

The year is 1793. France has descended into madness, and the guillotine waits for anyone who dares to be born noble. But someone is fighting back. In this collection of eleven pulse-quickening tales, Sir Percy Blakeney, England's most debonair aristocrat, leads a secret league of English gentlemen committed to one audacious goal: snatching doomed French aristocrats from the jaws of the Terror and spiriting them to safety across the Channel. By day, he is the foppish, seemingly witless darling of London society. By night, he becomes the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, a master of disguise whose signature flower serves as both a rallying cry and a taunt to his enemies. When Madeleine Lannoy, a woman stripped of everything her husband murdered, her child stolen by the monstrous Jean Paul Marat finds herself dancing for coins in the streets, her only purpose vengeance, she encounters the Pimpernel and discovers that hope, against all odds, is not yet dead. Orczy writes historical adventure with the verve of a penny dreadful and the heart of a romantic. The result is pure escapist thrill-making that invented a genre and still delivers.