When a treacherous superior officer forced Heris Serrano to resign her commission in the Regular Space Service, she thought she would simply be marking time captaining a rich lady's interstellar yacht. But things seem to happen when Heris is around. During Lady Cecelia's most recent pleasure cruise, Heris exposed a sinister 'hunting club' which used humans as prey, and in the process rescued some former Fleet friends and colleagues betrayed by the same senior officer who engineered her own resignation from Fleet. All well and good, but one of the hunters had been none other than Cecelia's nephew Prince Gerel - first in line to the throne. In an attempt to avoid a royal scandal, Lady Cecelia volunteers herself and her yacht to take the Prince home. Cecelia remembers her nephew as a rather bright young man. So what possessed him to become involved with the 'hunting club'? As the voyage proceeds, and the Prince becomes less and less like himself, Cecelia begins to suspect foul play. Someone is poisoning the heir to the throne, and once again Heris's skills are called upon to solve the deadly mystery.