Roger Brook – 'wanted' for illegal duelling – sailed for Calcutta in the summer of 1796. With him went his lovely Clarissa. And in Calcutta Clarissa was abducted. Abducted by Rinaldo Malderini, a Venetian senator and a disciple of the Devil, an enemy as vicious and unscrupulous as any that Roger Brook had faced.

Through shipwreck, capture by slavers, a desperate night attack on a walled city, Roger Brook seeks his revenge: and achieves it on entering Venice with Napoleon.