It begins in the Scottish Highlands, in the infernal coal mines of the Jamisson family, where twenty-one-year-old Mack McAsh spends most of his waking hours. Bound to his employer for life and threatened always by firedamp, the explosive gas that may ignite at any moment and bury him, Mack burns with the desire to escape. He finds an unlikely ally in Lizzie Hallim, the beautiful, willful, young aristocratic woman who yearns to get away from her own kind of hell.
