Libros publicados

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.

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.