The second instalment of the Burning Chambers series finds Minou and her family facing peril as sixteenth-century France is plunged once more into religious strife and regal intrigue.

June 1572: for ten years the Wars of Religion have raged across France. Neighbours have become enemies, lives have been lost, and the country has been torn apart over matters of religion, citizenship and sovereignty. But now a precarious peace is in the balance: a royal wedding has been negotiated by Catherine de' Medici and Jeanne d'Albret, an alliance between the Catholic Crown and Henri, the Huguenot king of Navarre. It is a marriage that could see France reunited at last.

Meanwhile in Puivert, an invitation has arrived for Minou Joubert and her family to attend this wedding in Paris in August. But what Minou does not know is that the Joubert family's oldest enemy, Vidal, will also be there. Nor that, within days of the marriage, on the eve of the Feast Day of St Bartholomew, Minou's family will be scattered and one of her children will have disappeared without trace . . .

A novel of revenge, persecution and loss, sweeping from Paris and Chartres to the City of Tears itself - the great refugee city of Amsterdam - this is a story of one family's fight to stay together, to survive and to find each other, against the tides of history . . .