Luke, now the King's special agent is sent to one of the home counties to assess the suitability of specific gentlemen to represent the King throughout the county and especially in Parliament and on the magisterial bench. Luke confronts a fractured Royalist community-divided by family feuds, social class, generational disputes, and bitterness between those who went into exile with the King and those whom remained in England and suffered under Cromwell's military republic. Luke's assessment is sidetracked by an alleged massacre, a missing Cromwellian magistrate, ambitious, conniving, and predatory women, a vindictive husband, secret societies, the plague, closely kept secrets, man-eating animals, and a spate of attempted and successful murders.