The silver is real. The war is not — yet.
Midshipman Ash Blake has survived storms, prize-fights, and a Barbary blade's edge to earn his place aboard His Majesty's gun ketch Arrow. But the waters off Gibraltar hide something deadlier than pirates: a French agent named Delacroix, moving Spanish silver and secret intelligence toward a fleet that means to break Britain's grip on the Mediterranean — and a vengeful captain named Reyes, who has sworn to sink Arrow before that happens.
For months, Lieutenant Collins and his crew must fight a war nobody has declared, threading the needle between diplomacy and disaster, watching harbors they cannot search, shadowing ships they dare not board. When the shadows finally break into open gunfire, Ash and his fellow officer Malcolm Hinshaw are thrown into night boardings, coastal ambushes, and a desperate cutting-out expedition that will decide whether Delacroix's silver ever reaches Toulon at all.
But victory carries its own reckoning. As Spain edges toward war and the guns of Cape Santa Maria light up the horizon, Ash learns that the flag he serves doesn't make him righteous, that the enemy is a man as easily broken as any Englishman, and that the price of this war is paid by more than soldiers.
Fast, fierce, and unflinching, Asher Blake: Silver and Gold is a tale of gunpowder and gunnery, loyalty forged under fire, and the cost of growing up in a navy that asks everything and forgives nothing.
Genre: Thriller
Midshipman Ash Blake has survived storms, prize-fights, and a Barbary blade's edge to earn his place aboard His Majesty's gun ketch Arrow. But the waters off Gibraltar hide something deadlier than pirates: a French agent named Delacroix, moving Spanish silver and secret intelligence toward a fleet that means to break Britain's grip on the Mediterranean — and a vengeful captain named Reyes, who has sworn to sink Arrow before that happens.
For months, Lieutenant Collins and his crew must fight a war nobody has declared, threading the needle between diplomacy and disaster, watching harbors they cannot search, shadowing ships they dare not board. When the shadows finally break into open gunfire, Ash and his fellow officer Malcolm Hinshaw are thrown into night boardings, coastal ambushes, and a desperate cutting-out expedition that will decide whether Delacroix's silver ever reaches Toulon at all.
But victory carries its own reckoning. As Spain edges toward war and the guns of Cape Santa Maria light up the horizon, Ash learns that the flag he serves doesn't make him righteous, that the enemy is a man as easily broken as any Englishman, and that the price of this war is paid by more than soldiers.
Fast, fierce, and unflinching, Asher Blake: Silver and Gold is a tale of gunpowder and gunnery, loyalty forged under fire, and the cost of growing up in a navy that asks everything and forgives nothing.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Perry Comer's Asher Blake Silver and Gold