A frightened scullery maid brings Crispin Guest to a corpse hidden in her room, and the Tracker soon learns that the dead man was a courier carrying an object important enough to threaten relations between kingdoms. The case becomes more dangerous when Miles Aleyn, the man implicated in Crispin’s own fall for treason, reappears in London. Crispin must suppress his desire for revenge long enough to separate Aleyn’s schemes from the murder and discover who is manipulating servants, courtiers and political messages around King Richard II.
The mystery belongs to the unsettled opening years of Richard II’s reign, only a few years after the Peasants’ Revolt had shaken royal government and London. Couriers, household retainers and personal loyalties mattered enormously in an age when political information travelled by hand and when a disgraced noble could be both useful and suspect. Westerson contrasts the ceremonial world around the young king with the poorer streets in which Crispin now works, making his divided social identity central to the investigation rather than merely part of his backstory.
