Matthew Corbett has amnesia, as most heroes in series of historical swashbuckling potboilers have to get at some point or another. But that's just the start of the ever-increasing series of complications, setbacks, disasters and peculiar happenstances that beset our hero. After a farught sea voyage, he is whisked to London and plunged into Newgate Prison, while a deadly masked avenger, a dangerous new drink, and a somwewhat scurrilous broadsheet plague the city. At the back of it all lie the tentacled tentacles of Dr Fell with an even more dangerous rival stalking his machinations, as it were. Fun stuff, Mccammon has mastered this sort of deadly serious melodramatic nonsense and delivers it with no small measure of skill and an imagination tempered on the fiery forge of eighties paperback horror.