The first volume in Plaidy's Georgian saga.

True love never ran smoothly for the beautiful Sophia Dorothea, darling of Celle, who first lost her heart to Philip Königsmarck on her seventh birthday.

At sixteen, a pawn in seventeenth-century German politics, she was forced into marriage with George Lewis, Crown Prince of Hanover and the future George I of England, who cared only for women and war.

Clara von Platen, the uncrowned ruler of Hanover, jealous, ruthless and sexually insatiable, is spurned by Königsmarck when he re-appears in the life of Sophia Dorothea. In revenge, she plans his ruin-and that of the sad princess he so recklessly loves…