In 1650 Luke is sent to Maryland on a joint mission: Catholic proprietor Lord Baltimore seeks to understand his collapsing authority, and General Cromwell needs to assess the situation as a precursor to the English republic's planned attack on the remaining Royalist colonies on the Chesapeake. Luke becomes involved with a dysfunctional planter family of an old adversary which is beset by a series of murders that may stem from an atrocity committed years earlier in England, or from the current political turmoil on the Chesapeake. The situation involves a family breakdown, bitter planter rivalries, piracy, renegade Amerindians, a major Indian conflict, problems along the Delaware, violent weather conditions, a Puritan settlement expelled from Virginia and invited by Baltimore to settle in Maryland - an offer repaid by their determination to reject their Papist overlord and erect God's kingdom, the machinations of neighbouring Virginia, the recreation of a Jesuit mission and the clandestine incursion of a foreign power. Luke struggles to solve the murders and save the Chesapeake for England.