Hawke Rising

Falmouth, November 1776. Fourteen-year-old Jack Hawke stands on the quayside with everything he owns in a canvas bag, watching his mother say goodbye to the captain she barely trusts, the price of keeping her son off the press gang's list and out of poverty.
Aboard HMS Ardent, Jack finds a berth of strangers who will become the closest thing he has to brothers: loud, shrewd Dunne; precise, watchful Peel, small, determined Tully, the boy everyone quietly protects. He finds Mr Tench, the sailing master who sees something in Jack's navigation that can't be taught, and who once knew Jack's father.
Because Thomas Hawke was a sailing master too, once the finest anyone had seen. He died broken, nine years before this story opens, and no one will say why.
As Jack proves himself in cutting-out raids against enemy privateers, in prize actions that test his nerve at fourteen years old, and in a captain's cabin where a debt of guilt hangs unexplained in the air, one word keeps surfacing about his father's fall: unjust. A ship's name keeps surfacing too, the Resolute.
By the time Jack walks up the gangway of a Gibraltar-bound packet at fifteen, he is no longer the boy who left Falmouth. But the truth about his father is still out there, waiting.
Book One of THE HAWKE SERIES, a coming-of-age naval adventure for readers of character-driven, historically grounded age-of-sail fiction.