A deadly assignment. A land poisoned by treachery and battle. She plunged in headfirst. Late in 1780, the publisher of a loyalist magazine in Wilmington, North Carolina offers an amazing assignment to Helen Chiswell, his society page writer. Pose as the widowed, gentlewoman sister of a British officer in the Seventeenth Light Dragoons, travel to the encampment of the British Legion in the Carolina backcountry, and write a feature on Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton. But Helen's publisher has secret reasons for sending her into danger. And because Helen, a loyalist, has ties to a family the redcoats suspect as patriot spies, she comes under suspicion of a brutal, brilliant British officer. At the bloody Battle of Cowpens, Helen must confront her past to save her life.