New Orleans, 1815. The guns of the great battle have fallen silent, but out in the drowned country below the city, ships still vanish. Crews are murdered, cargoes carried off, and the merchant princes who dine at the finest tables are howling for the navy to make it stop.
When Captain Johnson hands First Lieutenant Thomas Hardy of the United States Marines a single blunt order, "do what has to be done," Hardy takes seven and twenty men into a maze of reed and cypress and black water to burn the pirates out of their lairs, one bloody nest at a time. Fever kills more of his marines than shot ever does. The swamp gives up its secrets slowly, and never for free.
But the cutthroats in the marsh are only the blade. The hand that guides it wears fine dark cloth and a silver swan at the throat, and it belongs to a man too rich, too respected, and too clever to touch. To reach him, Hardy must break a fortified river compound, trust a condemned pirate who was once an honest ship’s master, and answer the question that shadows every order he is given: how far past the law can a man go and still keep his oath?
Powder smoke and cold steel, fever and mud, and a reckoning up a river no honest boat will travel. Some orders cannot be carried out cleanly. This one will cost blood to the last page.
Genre: Thriller
When Captain Johnson hands First Lieutenant Thomas Hardy of the United States Marines a single blunt order, "do what has to be done," Hardy takes seven and twenty men into a maze of reed and cypress and black water to burn the pirates out of their lairs, one bloody nest at a time. Fever kills more of his marines than shot ever does. The swamp gives up its secrets slowly, and never for free.
But the cutthroats in the marsh are only the blade. The hand that guides it wears fine dark cloth and a silver swan at the throat, and it belongs to a man too rich, too respected, and too clever to touch. To reach him, Hardy must break a fortified river compound, trust a condemned pirate who was once an honest ship’s master, and answer the question that shadows every order he is given: how far past the law can a man go and still keep his oath?
Powder smoke and cold steel, fever and mud, and a reckoning up a river no honest boat will travel. Some orders cannot be carried out cleanly. This one will cost blood to the last page.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Perry Comer's The Pirate Lair