RICHARD LEE BYERS is the author of over twenty-five fantasy and horror novels, including the Forgotten Realms titles Dissolution, The Rage, The Rite, The Ruin, Queen of the Depths, The Black Bouquet, and the upcoming trilogy The Haunted Lands. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and he is a frequent guest at Florida science fiction conventions and at GenCon Indianapolis, where he participates in the writer's symposium.

When Shamur Uskevren, the matriarch of one of Sembia's oldest and most powerful merchant families, is tricked by an angry wizard into an assassination attempt on her own husband, her family is thrown into turmoil. Once the truth is dicovered, she and her husband must struggle to save their family and stop the sorcerer. But in her anger, she has fogotten one thing: in the world of intrigue and decption, of shadows and lies that is Sembia, nothing is ever what it seems.