Beautiful, young and yet fiercely independent, Shikara Bartlett sorely misses her much-loved father, the renowned archaeologist Professor Richard Bartlett, who appears to have gone missing on his latest ‘dig’ near the Pyramids of Egypt.
What makes it even worse for Shikara is that in his absence her strait-laced uncle and Guardian is determined to marry her off to the middle-aged Lord Stroud, who is pompous, boring and far too old at forty-four.