In the ninth installment of Lauren Willig’s bestselling Green Carnation series, an atrocious poet teams up with an American widow to avoid Napoleon’s invasion of Britain. Magic formula agent Augustus Whittlesby offers spent ten years undercover in France, posing as an insufferably bad poet. The French monitoring officers can’t carry to learn his work closely enough to identify the info drowned within a sea of verbiage.

New York-born Emma Morris Delagardie is certainly a thorn in Augustus’s aspect. An old about The Garden Intrigue college friend of Napoleon’s stepdaughter, she found France with her uncle, the American envoy; eloped with a Frenchman; and has been rattling across the salons of Paris ever since. Widowed for four years, she entertains herself by taking in an excessive amount of champagne, holding a every week salon, and loudly critiquing Augustus’s poetry.

As Napoleon pursues his programs for the invasion of Britain, Whittlesby hears of a top-secret device to become demonstrated at a residence party at Malmaison. The capture? The only way in is with Emma, that has been asked to create a masque for the weekend’s entertainment.

Emma is at a crossroads: Should she return to the States or remain in France? She’ll perform anything to postpone the decision-even if this means teaming up with that silly poet Whittlesby to create a masque for Bonaparte’s home party. But each soon learns that surface looks are misleading. With this challenging masque within a masque, nothing at all will go quite as scripted- specifically Augustus’s emotions for Emma.