An unlikely friendship between a Canadian teenager and a South African girl sparks a journey to untangle an unsolved murder. Eighteen-year-old Hilary Anson's startling good looks and wanton ways soon scandalize the denizens of sleepy Kelso County, but young Sam Mitchell is instantly enthralled by his new friend. Over one sun-soaked summer, Hilary vastly improves Sam's equestrian skills, but also drops inscrutable details about her past in apartheid-era South Africa. Mysteries mount, until Hilary vanishes, leaving at least one unsolved murder in her wake. Many years and two failed marriages later, Sam sets out for South Africa, determined to crack the enigma of Hilary Anson. In doing so, he finds himself confronting a shocking secret of his own.

On a rainy afternoon in 1864, a gunman enters a Mexico City restaurant armed with an antiquated English flintlock pistol. His purpose: to assassinate a conservative army officer named General Leonardo Márquez. The plan goes hopelessly awry, and it is left to the gunman's lifelong friend, a bookish young Mexican named Diego Serrano, to pick up the pieces— if he can. But Mexico is in turmoil, bankrupt and riven by war, with its liberal president, Benito Juárez, in northern exile and an Austrian noble on a precarious throne. In these powder keg circumstances, the bungled assassination sets off an explosive chain reaction: a drama of loyalty and deceit, honour and dishonour, that unfolds against a backdrop of imperial splendour and brutal conflict. Diego is eventually forced to make an irreversible choice, and his decision has seismic consequences for him and his nation. Seamlessly blending history and invention, The Empire of Yearning is an irresistible sequel...