Hawke's Duel

Jack Hawke is sixteen, gifted, and rising fast, but the sea doesn't care how young you are. A duel with France's finest waits, and a secret about his father's ruin waits with it.
Now serving aboard the Falmouth packet Perseverance under the exacting Lieutenant Thorn, Jack masters a different kind of seamanship – until a chance encounter with a privateer off Cape Finisterre leaves Thorn wounded and Jack alone at the helm.
Posted to HMS Defiant under the brilliant, unpredictable Captain Bevan, Jack is thrown into the full weight of naval warfare: a savage single-ship action against a French frigate, a desperate defence of a merchant convoy, and the quiet, unshakeable presence of Erik Strom, a Swedish able seaman who seems to already know exactly where Jack is going to need him.
Then, on a captured French frigate, a dying sailor's fevered words reopen the wound Jack has carried since Book One: a court martial, a lost ship called the Resolute, and the possibility that his father was never guilty at all.
As the duel with the French frigate L'Audace approaches — the fight Jack doesn't yet know will define his name — the past and the present are closing in together.
Book Two of THE HAWKE SERIES — fast, brutal, brilliant naval fiction.