On the eve of Napoleon's Russian Campaign a conscripted engineer gets swept up in events that will forever alter his life and all Europe.
"If you read in bed, you might be up all night." - Frank Schulwolf, Amazon"Sit back and strap yourself in for a riotous, rollicking ride following appealing heroes, heroines and villains across war-torn Napoleonic Europe." Peter Cresswell, Not PC"Perren's economical style moves one quickly from page-to-page while leaving little for interpretation, and everything to purposeful conquest. The reader is driven by one overriding question: will a man's passionate pursuit of a woman prove more powerful than a ruler's quest for an empire?" - Michael Moeller, The AtlasphereHOW FAR WILL ONE MAN GO FOR LOVE AND FREEDOM?Rebellious engineer Breutier Armande is drafted into the Grande Armeé on the eve of Napoleon's 1812 Russian war campaign. On a spying mission to St. Petersburg he meets Kaarina, daughter of the counselor to Tsar Alexander I.The pair soon fall in love -- but Kaarina is betrothed to Agripin, a brooding Cossack and a favorite of the Tsar. When she refuses him, Agripin kidnaps her, sowing a showdown to the death between the two young men.Risking a firing squad, Breutier deserts Napoleon's army during the war. Dodging the vengeance of the world's most powerful rulers catapults him onto a perilous quest to hunt down his greatest enemy.Interweaving the characters' personal dramas with the battles in Europe forms the core of the story. The conflict peaks at the moment when, for the first time in 400 years, foreign armies invaded France, leaving behind Cossacks in Paris.