April 1794: The Reign of Terror has been striking France like a plague for half a year. Daily, hundreds have followed King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine-some guilty of real crimes, some completely innocent. George-Jacques Danton has just met his own end in a poignant tableau captured for posterity on the cover of this book. His friend Joseph Fouché returns to Paris on the very next day, determined to avoid his own execution. How he does so-and manages to thereby end the Terror by overthrowing the government of the maniacal Maximilian Robespierre-is the subject of this first-person period mystery. It is a tale of terror and trickery, political struggle and sexual intrigue, involving Fouché's tenacious search for the murderer of Charles-Maurice Talleyrand's alluring, seventeen-year-old niece and his mistress's efforts to inherit a fabulous chateau-against the backdrop of our hero's audacious three-month effort to save his own neck.