Carlisle, 1592.

Robert Carey abandoned the lace-collared finery of Queen Elizabeth I's court for the lawless badlands between the kingdoms of England and Scotland. He's found life among the border's cattle-rustlers, horse-thieves, arsonists, kidnappers and murderers curiously engaging. But now, alas, he's been summoned back to London. Before he can return to his new home in the North, Carey must find his missing brother, clear the family name, navigate a feud between playwrights, identify a badly decomposed body washed up on the Queen's privy steps, and investigate a murder some thirty years past...

Plunging readers straight into the racous world of late sixteenth-century border reivers and unfettered Elizabethan intrigue, Knives in the South is the second chronicle of Sir Robert Carey's adventures, collecting the novels A Plague of Angels, A Murder of Crows and An Air of Treason under one volume.