Robert Bunch, the British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the Civil War's great forgotten men - half diplomat, half spy.  Tasked with ingratiating himself with the worst of his slavery-loving, cotton-growing neighbors, he secretly sent dispatch after dispatch back to London, underscoring a simple but essential point - the South was not to be trusted, even as Union bravado brought the United States and Britain perilously close to war.  Moving from the horrors of the slave trade to the high hypocrisy of Charleston's elegant social life to the chaotic, climactic shelling of Fort Sumter, Christopher Dickey masterfully excavates the story of a complex man in a complex time, one on whose savvy and sharp pen turned the fortunes of two great powers.