The Ouzel Galley drifts helpless in a dead calm, her crew ravaged by fever, while a storm gathers on the horizon. Captain Tracy lies ailing in his cabin, tended by his devoted daughter Norah. It falls to mate Owen Massey to keep the ship together when the weather breaks, and his courage is tested when the crew spots a raft bobbing in the wreckage-strewn sea. Owen plunges into the churning waters to rescue a single survivor: Lancelot Carnegan, a man whose haunted eyes and guarded silence hint at secrets far darker than the storm that claimed his vessel. As if fate weren't cruel enough, the wounded merchantman soon crosses paths with a French privateer, and the Ouzel Galley must run a desperate gauntlet of cannon fire and close-quarters combat to survive. Kingston writes with the breathless urgency of a sea chest thrown open, layering his adventure with the tender thread of a daughter's devotion and the uneasy question of whether the stranger they've saved is friend or foe. This is the kind of story that made Victorian boys dream of the open ocean and all its terrors and glories.
