He had just been defeated. Manuel Belgrano, the general who had earned everyone’s admiration, was going through one of his worst moments. The resounding defeats in the battles of Vilcapugio and Ayohuma had left him in a bad position, and not just politically. Abandoned to his fate and far from glory, he was at the mercy of the powerful, those who knew little or nothing about the tragedies of the battlefield. He had no choice: he could face prison and ridicule, or blindly accept the mission entrusted to him by the government of Buenos Aires in the Old World. He said yes. But he never imagined that what lay ahead was one of the most absurd missions in the history of the Río de la Plata and that his traveling companion would be the ever-ambiguous Bernardino Rivadavia. In this hallucinatory drift, which would begin in imperial Rio de Janeiro and continue in Regency London, he would have to deal with Lord Strangford, Manuel de Sarratea, the buffoonish Count Domingo Cabarrús, and a whole series of shady characters, architects of the darkest intrigues. Travel, plots, betrayals, fleeting loves, loyalties that last as long as a breath and others that are sealed with blood.

With one foot in real events-the affair known as “the Italian affair”-and the other in the musings of what might have been, Felipe Pigna’s first work of fiction reads like a spy thriller and demands the attention that great historical figures always command. That is why Conspiracy in London is a unique novel, a book that only one of Argentina’s most renowned historians could have written.