When Matty Graves, acting lieutenant in the newly formed U.S. Navy, agrees to become a spy in the French colony of Saint-Dómingue, he plunges headlong into a brutal world of betrayal and double-cross beyond anything he's ever known. At first the bloody civil war between former slaves and their mixed-race overseers simply offers a way to test himself and a means to purge his guilt over the death of his former captain. But soon Matty is drawn into the heart of the conflict when he meets the flamboyant Juge and the mysterious Grandfather Chatterbox—and faces an interrogation by the brutal colonel known as “The Whip.” White supremacists, cutthroat patriots and desperate rebels vie for control in the Colonial world's richest island. No one is what he seems, and Matty must sort out the twisted lies from the cold, hard truth—and keep himself alive long enough to learn from his mistakes.