"Teddy Roosevelt has steered the Progressive Republican Party and the United States through the Mexican insurrection, and what would have been World War I. Mexico has become a part of the United States, but Europe has been destroyed by the Kaiser's v-gas. Japan, Germany, and what's left of the British Commonwealth are struggling for supremacy in the new world of the Twentieth Century. Roosevelt has created a spy agency called the Black Chamber, and two of his best Black Chamber agents are Luz O'Malley and her lover, Ciara Whelan. Luz and Ciara are tasked to figure out where all the Chinese antiquities being smuggled into the USA are coming from. As they dig deeper and deeper, bodies keep turning up all over Chinatown and it is no better in Shanghai. Luz and Ciara have to watch out for daggers in the dark."--Page [4] of cover.