"Had I known what lay ahead of me in the jungles of Africa," he wrote," I would never have contemplated coming in the first place." Dr. Cromwell was part of a notorious West African slave raid that took place in June 1806. He was the ship's head physician with two surgeons and three loblolly boys for assistance. Hence, the voyage to the Dark Continent was routine and uneventful for the most part. However, as soon as his team set foot on the shores of Yorubaland in search of able-bodied slaves, bizarre things began to happen, people disappeared mysteriously, strange tootles were heard in the middle of night. The team's belated knowledge of 'Olori Ejo', a local superstition involving snakes, spirits and sinister deaths, only made matters worse. So when his good friend and budding explorer, Lord Powell, vanished mysteriously one fateful night while the others slept, Cromwell knew he had made a wrong decision.

This is a consensus-challenging history of the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers controversy of 1948 to 1950, a criminal case in which Hiss was convicted of perjury after two long trials. Chambers claimed that Hiss had passed classified State Department documents to him in 1937 and 1938 for transmittal to the Soviet Union. Hiss denied the charges but was found guilty at his second trial (the jury could not reach a decision in the first). Hiss was not charged with espionage because of the statute of limitations. The main focus of this narrative concentrates on the early months of the affair, from August 1948 when Chambers appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and denounced Hiss and several others as underground Communists, to the following December when Hiss was indicted for perjury. The truth emerges as the story unfolds, based in part on grand jury records unsealed by court order in 1999, leading to the conclusion that the stories Whittaker Chambers told the authorities and later published about himself and Alger Hiss in the Communist underground are completely fraudulent.

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers's shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948, that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. In this work, the author turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions.

When the three ancient Princes of the firstborn begin to stir beneath the capital of the Essalieyan Empire, Jewel Markess of House Terafin must journey to face the Oracle in order to save the city, but the demons seek to stop her.