Queen Flavia, dutifully but unhappily married to her cousin Rudolf V, writes to her true love Rudolf Rassendyll. The letter is carried by von Tarlenheim and his servant Bauer to be delivered by hand, but Fritz is betrayed by Bauer and it is stolen by the exiled Rupert of Hentzau and his loyal cousin the Count of Luzau-Rischenheim. Hentzau sees in it a chance to return to favor by informing the pathologically jealous and paranoid King.

Jasper Detchard is a disgraced British officer, now selling his blade to the highest bidder. Currently that's Michael Elphberg, half-brother to the King of Ruritania. Michael wants the throne for himself, and Jasper is one of the scoundrels he hires to help him take it. But when Michael makes his move, things don't go entirely to plan-and the penalty for treason is death. Rupert of Hentzau is Michael's newest addition to his sinister band of henchmen. Charming, lethal, and intolerably handsome, Rupert is out for his own ends-which seem to include getting Jasper into bed. But Jasper needs to work out what Rupert's really up to amid a maelstrom of plots, swordfights, scheming, impersonation, desire, betrayal, and murder. Nobody can be trusted. Everyone has a secret. And love is the worst mistake you can make. A retelling of the swashbuckling classic The Prisoner of Zenda from a very different point of view.

This novel is an exciting fusion of a Sherlock Holmes mystery with the Ruritanian world of intrigue and skulduggery of Anthony Hope's novel "The Prisoner of Zenda"

The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), by Anthony Hope, is an adventure novel in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Political forces within the realm are such that, in order for the king to retain the crown, his coronation must proceed. Fortuitously, an English gentleman on holiday in Ruritania who resembles the monarch is persuaded to act as his political decoy in an effort to save the unstable political situation of the interregnum.

A cultural history of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda that explores its afterlife including how it was adapted for stage and screen, woven into narratives about the Cold War, and influenced children's writers such as Frances Hodgson Burnett and Meg Cabot.