The Last Hawk is Catherine Asaro's third novel of the Skolian Empire, an interstellar civilization spanning hundreds of worlds and thousands of years. Each book approaches the Empire and a member of the ruling family from a different angle, or at a different moment in future history. Now, in The Last Hawk, Asaro tells the tale of the lost heir to the Empire. Fleeing the heat of battle in a wounded spacecraft, Kelric crash-lands on a proscribed planet where a matriarchy rules through the medium of a complex game. The women in power help to heal him, but destroy his ship and determine that he can never leave - for his knowledge of their world, if revealed to the Empire, would cause the rapid fall of their civilization. And so his rescue turns into an imprisonment of years, decades, a time in which he finds love and a challenging place in the universal game.