Next in Fidelis Morgan's hugely entertaining series featuring the irrepressible Countess Ashby de la Zouche and her stupendously bosomed former maid, Alpiew. It is the silly season. News is thin on the ground. Newspapers are proliferating and there are even rumours that a woman is trying to start a daily paper. The Cues are desperate to hook in new readers for The Trumpet. As luck would have it the new wife of an old friend of the Countess wants her to chaperone her beautiful step-daughter, Virginia, to France, and so, to kill two birds with one stone, the Countess proposes that she and Alpiew write their Trumpet column from the Royal Courts. Almost as soon as their feet touch French soil, a recent spate of poisonings at the Courts proves fatal, and the Countess and Alpiew are once again plunged into a murder hunt. All this while they struggle valiantly to protect the young girl's virginity from a string of rampant Frenchmen. Their trail leads through Huguenot plots against the king and Catholic plots against the English, through the intricacies of the new French Cuisine, bigotry, decadence, sexual depravity, grand living and burly men whose hobby is embroidery.