Conville & Walsh

THE EMPEROR’S GOLD, the first of a series of historical espionage thrillers, is an accelerating journey of intrigue, action, history betrayal and death.

1805. The armies of France have beaten every challenger. Now they camp by the English Channel, awaiting only safe passage to complete Napoleon’s domination of Europe. Britain is militarily weak, politically divided, unsettled by her rioting poor and under constant threat of another Irish insurrection.

Into this feverish environment, ripe for treason and sedition, comes a dead man. Pulled half-drowned from a shipwreck, his past erased, Tom Roscarrock is put to work for the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, a dubious and unknown off-shoot of the Government operating independently and to uncertain ends. He is thrown into a bewildering world of political intrigue and violence, moving among the refined salons of Francophile London high society, the brutal skirmishes between the brittle militia and manipulated food-rioters, and the shadowy meetings where treason is now close to fruition.

In France, a plan is underway to neutralise the Royal Navy and shatter the last of England’s political stability. In England, the man who recruited Roscarrock has disappeared, Comptrollerate-General agents keep turning up dead, and reports of a secret French fleet are panicking the authorities.

Roscarrock begins to realise that his mission is a deliberate device to reveal the British spy network in France … His own past, previously opaque even to himself, is now the key to the conspiracy. What to everyone else is a battle of Empires becomes for Tom Roscarrock a quest for private vengeance.