Highcrowne hits the fan when democracy comes to town. Riots, demonstrations, assassination .... One thing you can be sure of is that Eva Thorne will be at the center of it all. Eva doesn't want to be the lead candidate for the Human Crown-especially since she's Solhan and not human at all, and certainly not after the elf interim council declares democracy a treasonous activity punishable by death. No one expected a new player on the board-or rather a very, very old one. People are turning into puppets under the control of an ancient bodysnatching plant, but someone is pulling the puppeteer's strings, and as usual, nothing is what it seems. Can Eva stop the plant creature from taking over the world? Or should she let it win, just to avoid a fate worse than death-being elected?Eva has become the cliché, a hard-drinking, hard-nosed private detective, bitter and uncaring. Or so she thinks. A high-profile murder throws Highcrowne into chaos, and the man she's falling in love with, despite her best efforts to avoid it, is the prime suspect. She sets out to prove his innocence and uncovers plots within plots, and dangers far greater than the world's deadliest assassin or even the bodysnatching plant taking over the world. Old lovers and old gods come back to haunt her, and in the end, she learns sometimes winning means losing.