Luke, now the King's special agent is sent to one of the home counties to assess the suitability of the shire's gentry to represent the King across the county, in Parliament and on the bench. Luke finds 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 who remained behind and suffered under the Republic. The assessment is sidetracked by an alleged massacre, a disappearing 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.