Cutlass and Cudgel
The coast of Wessex, early 19th century. Smugglers run their cargo under cover of darkness while the King's cutters give chase through the moonlit Channel. When a midshipman of HMS White Hawk is taken hostage by the smuggling gang, he finds himself caught between the men who hold him captive and the boy sent to watch him, a farm-hand son of one of the very criminals sworn to sink his ship. The boy nurses a secret dream: to sail aboard an Excise vessel, to hunt the very trade his own father helps sustain. But loyalty and necessity make strange bedfellows, and the friendship that blossoms between hostage and watcher threatens to compromise them both. When escape finally comes, it will test everything each of them believes about duty, family, and the kind of man he wants to become. Fenn was a master of adventure with teeth, and this novel delivers: contraband runs at dead of night, brutal chases across the cliffs, and the quietly devastating moral reckoning at its heart. For readers who want their nautical adventures to ask something of them.
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Rebecca Dittman, TriciaG, Ann Boulais, Kyle Van DeGlast +4 more
