The Four Swans, book six, marks the mid-point in the Poldark series. Set in Cornwall and also elsewhere in England at this time, The Four Swans sees Ross Poldark, survivor of war, feuds, plagues, murder attempts, raids, rivalries and marriage to the longsuffering but fiery Demelza Carne, discovers a new danger in his midst when a young (and gradually dying) naval officer he rescued from certain death in a French prison, becomes openly enchanted with Demelza, and quietly seeks to gain the love of this ever-loyal, beautiful woman. Trouble also stirs in the Enys household, where tragedy pays a visit to Caroline and Dwight, and the doctor's health is still not all it could be as a result of his incarceration. And even amid the extravagance with which George Warleggan surrounds himself and his family, all is not well. George tries to quell fears about Valentine's paternity, but his terrible suspicions that the child he is raising as his own heir is in fact the offspring of his enemy Ross Poldark, sets off a venomous fever that imperils his relationship with Elizabeth, the only woman he has ever loved. Meanwhile Morwenna's wedded life with the moneyed cleric, Osborne Whitworth, is an ongoing nightmare from which a pure-hearted boy, Demelza's younger brother Drake Carne, wishes to rescue her, unaware of the danger in which he places them both. The Four Swans was perhaps the last time Graham allowed such a deliberate pace to be used in his Poldark books, and this novel stands as a sort of gift from the writer to those who love the series, and lets a reader sit back and feel the totality of this immense literary undertaking go on around him...right before the series leaves familiar waters and plunges into the rapids of the year 1799 and the violent nineteenth-century after that.