As Captain Jack Aubrey cools his heels in a Maltese harbour, awaiting repairs to his ship, war rages on. Fearing that hostilities will end before he has any further opportunities for fame and fortune, Aubrey accepts several secret missions, but all is not as it seems.
Will a double agent be the undoing of both Jack Aubrey and his friend, shipтАЩs surgeon Stephen Maturin?
тАШThis is OтАЩBrian at his brilliant entertaining best. When he is on this form the rest of us who write of the Napoleonic conflict might as well give up and try a new career.тАЩ
BERNARD CORNWELL
тАШCaptain Aubrey and his surgeon, Stephen Maturin, compose one of those complex and fascinating pairs of characters which have inspired thrilling stories of all kinds since the Iliad.тАЩ
IRIS MURDOCH & JOHN BAYLEY
Patrick OтАЩBrian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel long AubreyтАУMaturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.