In this historical novel of dramatic impact, sea Captain, Richard Melville Grave, the patriarch of the legendary Graves? shipping family was devastated when the hurricane of 1846 demolished his fleet of fifteen merchant ships in Havana, Cuba. To save his estate and fortune and without the knowledge of his two sons, Graves, with his last remaining clipper ship, the Laurence Pike, makes an bargain with a former slaver and embarks on a perilous journey to barter for slaves in the jungles of Africa?s Ivory Coast. That gamble with the devil proves a terrible blunder and the undertaking becomes riddled with murder. One son, Captain John Thomas Graves, not realizing the millstone of slavery had exposed the family to the malevolence of the townspeople, restores the clipper ship, renames her Golden Raven, and leaves to seek his own way. In the course of an unlikely partnership with Monar, a shrewd and handsome former slave, they rescue Lady Evelyn Bunting, a striking, independent woman, herself a Master Mariner. The three seafarer?s lives become romantically interwoven and, over time, an unbreakable bond grows between them. Author Barry Wood takes the lives of three people into the wealth of Victoria?s England, pirates off the Barbary Coast and conflict with a massive Russian warship in the Crimea. Yet it is when they return to England, and the affluent Lord Warfield Bunting, Evelyn?s father, makes John Thomas and Monar a life-altering, but dangerous, offer.