Historic Mysteries South

Richard Sharpe, asked to help an old friend, meets, at last, the greatest enemy. Five years after the Battle of Waterloo, Sharpe's peaceful retirement in Normandy is shattered. An old friend, Don Blas Vivar, is missing in Chile, reported dead at rebel hands--a report his wife refuses to believe. She appeals to Sharpe to find out the truth. Sharpe, along with Patrick Harper, finds himself bound for Chile via St. Helena, where they have a fateful meeting with the fallen emperor Napoleon.

1803. The Napoleonic Wars. A Royal Navy warship is ordered to pursue an enemy frigate to the icy waters far south in the Indian Ocean. There, it must capture the enemy ship and retrieve a mysterious sea chest, contents unknown, failure not permitted. For the determined young captain and his eager crew, this already dangerous mission turns into a battle with a mysterious vessel that appears not in the sea, but unbelievably, impossibly, in the sky above. But nothing could prepare the crew for what lay beyond the 50th latitude of south.

This fascinating third volume in the Britannia's Fist series will have you pondering how easily history could have been swayed differently. What if other countries had become involved in America's Civil War? Historian Peter G. Tsouras presents the third installment in his Britannia's Fist alternate history series.

Returning to London after his honeymoon (For Deader or Worse), Bow Street Runner John Pickett soon discovers wedded bliss is not without its pitfalls, as he finds it galling to be financially dependent on Julia, his aristocratic bride. When he is summoned to the home of Lady Washbourn, Pickett finds he has something in common with the young countess: like himself, Lady Washbourn has married above her station and now finds herself adrift in a world to which she does not truly belong.

Newly promoted to command of his first ship, Captain Jack Aubrey, along with his crew, and new friend and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin, must patrol a Mediterranean fraught with peril but rich with rewards. A glimpse of white sails on the horizon could mean a prize to be taken – or a fight for survival.

With a beautiful and clever wife, a growing investigative business, and a baby due any day, former Bow Street Runner John Pickett finally has a respectable life far removed from his beginnings as a juvenile pickpocket in the rookeries of St. Giles.

En route to England and his next command, Captain Jack Aubrey, and his friend, ship’s surgeon and secret agent Stephen Maturin, find themselves swept up in the War of 1812. As Aubrey convalesces from his wounds in a Boston hospital, awaiting the next prisoner exchange, Maturin’s past activities as a spy return to haunt him and precipitate both men into new and unexpected dangers.

On half-pay and without a command, Captain Jack Aubrey is stranded at home in an over-crowded cottage with his large and frequently bad-tempered family. When Jack has almost given up hope of ever returning to sea, Stephen Maturin, ship's doctor, occasional intelligence agent, and Jack's closest friend, brings secret orders that Jack is to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a Commodore's pennant.

Following a daring rescue, Jack Aubrey accepts a new command and a new commission to a far-flung destination. Ahead of him and his crew are the new sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and the terrifying hazards of an archipelago of islands in the East Indies, where their French enemies have near overwhelming superiority.

As he sails away from Port Jackson, Captain Jack Aubrey feels nothing but relief at leaving the penal colony and its inhabitants far behind. But, unknown to him, hidden among his crew is one Clarissa Oakes. With Britain at war on two fronts, with both America and France, Aubrey’s orders are to make for the Sandwich Islands and intervene in the conflict there.

In the fight against the French, a treaty with the Sultan of Pulo Prabang, a piratical Malay state, may prove decisive. Captain Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin, along with a hand-picked crew, must survive the dangers of the high forties and convey a diplomatic envoy to ensure this key alliance, but dangers, both natural and man-made, will dog their every move.

Estranged from her husband through her failure to produce an heir, Lady Fieldhurst resolves to repay his neglect by taking a lover. Fate takes a hand when she and her would-be lover enter her bedchamber to find Lord Fieldhurst lying on the floor - with her nail scissors protruding from his neck.

Having resigned his position at Bow Street in disgrace (at least in his own mind) and failed in his attempt to establish himself as a private agent, John Pickett toils away at a tedious job as a clerk in the city. When he is approached by a man wishing to hire him to extract a young lady being held against her will at an asylum for opium-eaters, Pickett jumps at the chance to prove himself, and has a very reluctant Julia commit him to the institution as a patient. But nothing at the Larches is exactly as it seems.

Having resigned his position at Bow Street, John Pickett waits in vain for someone - anyone! - to engage his services as a private inquiry agent. As weeks go by with no responses to his newspaper advertisement, he has taken to spending his days wandering idly about London rather than admit his failure to his wife.

With rumours of peace running rampant, Captain Jack Aubrey chances his luck on the stock exchange. However, when his plans go awry, Marshalsea prison awaits. Can Stephen Maturin rescue his friend from a politically motivated trial and the enormity of being stricken from the Navy Lists? When the world has turned its back against you, friendship is all.

Ordered home by despatch vessel, Captain Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin have been tasked with bringing the news of the latest victory in the war with America back to the government in Britain. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought upon the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attentions of two privateers who pursue their ship soon become menacing.

Jack Aubrey is a naval officer, a post-captain of experience and capacity. When The Letter of Marque opens he has been struck off the Navy List for a crime he has not committed. With Aubrey is his friend and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, who is also an unofficial British intelligence agent.

Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island in the Dutch East Indies as the Napoleonic Wars rage on, circumstances look far from promising for Captain Jack Aubrey and his crew. And yet, having overcome the odds and contrived their escape, still further peril awaits in the fiercely tidal waters of the Salibu Passage and the penal settlements of New South Wales.

South Africa, 1871. Jack Lark no longer walks alone. With the worldly Anna Baker by his side, he travels to the Cape Colony diamond fields determined to seek their fortune—and an adventurous new life together. The journey north soon turns violent as tensions erupt between other hopeful diggers and a gang of Boer men. Everyone has their eye on the same elusive prize—and some will stop at nothing to get it. For Jack and Anna, unearthing a diamond is only half the battle. Getting out of the mines alive will prove far more difficult—and dangerous.

Captain Bligh, of Bounty fame, is now governor of New South Wales and facing mutiny anew, having lost the support of local settlers. Jack Aubrey is commissioned to come to his rescue. With a beautiful but dangerous spy on board, along with an unwelcome hold full of convicts, and war with America brewing, can Captain Jack Aubrey reach Australia in one piece?