"Through the lives and ambitions of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the author transports us into the post-revolutionary world of 1804, a chaotic and fragile period in the young country and a time of tremendous global instability. Compressing his narrative into the final year of Hamilton's life, Fleming, with a tragedian's sense of the inevitable and an historian's eye for new and startling insights, recounts the dramatic events that led up to Hamilton and Burr's fateful, fatal encounter. "--BOOK JACKET.