Europe in 1704 has no place for a woman with a mind like that of Heloise. Her escape to where she would be accepted has been shipwrecked. Literally.
Heloise LeClerc, refusing to be a housewife or spinster aunt, set sail for Tahiti, where women can attend university. After a shipwreck leaves her stranded far from her goal, she must make her way by her wits or starve. Her efforts lead her into a Pacific-spanning network of information brokers, and to a research institute on Rarotonga ruled by a Hawaiian warrior queen. There she gains friends, fortune, and influence. For the first time she feels secure.
When the network asks her to examine the teetering empire of the Inca, it takes her close enough to the Caribbean to visit her family, where she finds them profiting from slavery. Faced with the horrors of the sugar plantations and the people she loves making decisions she hates, Heloise must decide what she stands for, what she will kill for, and what she will choose when there is no good answer.
This epic adventure of seafaring, science, and politics by Frederick J. Ross will take you from southeast Asia to the islands of the Pacific, to an Inca empire that did not fall, and to the European colonies of the Americas in a meticulously researched alternate 18th century.
