This is a stirring story of historical mystery and power in the days when the nation was young and vulnerable and adventurers hungered to turn its brilliant prospects to their personal gain. It is the story of the Burr Conspiracy. Three powerful men -- all accurately drawn historical figures -- appear in desperate collision with each other in a tale of treason that puts the very future of the nation and its tender new democracy at stake.

James Madison, secretary of state, is the unlikely hero who applies powerful intellect and icy nerves to breaking the plot.

Aaron Burr is the unlikely villain, the old friend who originally brought Madison together with his wife, Dolley. Elected vice president with Jefferson in 1800, Burr shatters the trust he enjoys by trying to steal the presidency from under Jefferson's nose.
Stripped of power, Burr goes home to New York to run for governor, is defeated, kills Alexander Hamilton in a raging duel and flees a murder indictment. He is a ruined man.

Enter the arch villain of the story and of history, General James Wilkinson, the only commander of the army known to have been a traitor; he was a secret agent for Spain, code Number 13. He seduces Burr with dreams of stealing the whole Louisiana Territory, New Orleans to Canada, the Mississippi to the Stony Mountains.

Deepening the story with tension and emotion, Madison's beautiful wife, Dolley, through whom much of the story is told, feels a special affection and debt to Burr who is an old friend and who stood by her when she desperately needed a friend. Dolley watches her old friend's depredations with growing anger and yet with a rich feminine understanding of the self-torments that Burr's own nature have imposed on him; thus we reach a depth of character that enriches our story

As the conspiracy to strip the United States of everything west of the Appalachians unfolds, the next step is to mount a filibustering expedition to seize Mexico where mountain mines gush gold. Wilkinson will throw the United States Army into the plot, which will be accomplished before the army realizes it has been used. Then, by closing the mouth of the Mississippi to western trade, they will pry the Mississippi Valley away from the United States, leaving it a small seaboard nation flanking a vast inland empire fueled on gold.

It is this that Madison must first divine and then find a way to defeat, always knowing that precipitate action may force the conspirators' hands and set things off before he can control them. As he painstakingly devises the brilliant move that will defeat the treasonous combine he must hold off British attacks on our ships and shipping but stopping short of war, deal with Napoleon's abuse of our commerce and trade while at home Federalists try to undermine everything even as radical democrats attack from the opposite side, claiming Jefferson and Madison have leavened the high ideals of democracy with Federalist practicalities -- that he has, in short, held to a centrist course.

All this while planning the stick he will get just one chance to thrust into Burr's spokes. Meanwhile, the story deepens and the character interplay grows richer because Madison in the end must use Wilkinson, himself the guiltiest of all, to stop Burr, whose political abilities make him the keystone to the plot without which it could not succeed. In a brilliant scene, Dolley makes us see the dichotomy of ethics this involves.

This wild clash of ambitions and aims in the days when the nation was very young and still forming yields a robust tale of action and intrigue, real figures of history dealing with real events, all shaped into story that has the power of fiction, the authenticity of fact.

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*a note on methods and sources inadvertently omitted from the published book