Having returned to Herouxville, capital of Vestonia, Max Renard has found himself drawn into the dangerous game of courtly intrigue. King Carl III is ill and weakened by his wounds. This leads to tensions between the various princely parties at court. The struggle for influence inside the country is spilling over onto a whole new level. Carl III's foreign enemies are taking advantage of his weakness and ramping up their pressure. The stakes are high, and Max has to find a delicate balance between his own personal interests and those of the powerful people in this new world. He'll have to use all the cunning and mastery at his disposal if he's going to raise his own profile and stay alive at the same time. Besides that, Max has a powerful new enemy, one against whom the usual methods are useless. Max will have to remember everything he learned from his adoptive mother if he's going to win this fight.

Alexey Osadchuk was born in 1979 in Ukraine. In the late 1990s his family moved to the south of Spain where they still live today. Alexey was an avid reader from an early age, devouring adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2010 he wrote his first fantasy novel which was immediately accepted for publication. He also used to be a passionate online gamer which prompted him to write the story of a man who joins an MMORPG game...