As dawn breaks on an early morning in 1346, 10 men embark from a pinnace on the shores of Normandy, France, and are greeted with a volley of crossbow bolts in response to their leader's war cry, "Desperta ferro! (Awake, Iron!)"

The 10 men are the Essex Dogs, a motley crew of archers and men-at-arms fighting for glory and profit under the banner of Sir Robert le Straunge at the debut of the Hundred Years' War. The reader will come to know these men well in the coming pages.

Loveday FitzTalbot, the leader of the Dogs, is a man haunted by his past and driven by the goal of seeing his men safely through the battles ahead and home again with coin in their pockets. The others are Millstone, Scotsman, Pismire, a fallen priest known only as Father, the archers Tebbe, Romford and Thorp, and two Welsh brothers, also archers, recruited on the eve of the army of King Edward's departure from Portsmouth, England. Each has his own stories to tell, but we get to know them best through the eyes and mind of FitzTalbot.

There are other notable characters -- the king himself, the Prince of Wales and the earls of Northampton and Warwick among them. One of my favorites of these is Northampton, a brave man with a dark sense of humor and a talent for inventive profanity.

Novels are built on plot and character. In this case, history provides the plot. Essex Dogs thrives on the twin peaks of character and action. The characters and what they face puts us into the midst of the horrors, the violence and blood of medieval warfare in the fight for the disputed throne of the kingdom. This is not a book for the squeamish. There's blood and gore, profanity and sex galore.

But it's rooted in historical accuracy. This is the fiction debut of Dan Jones, a bestselling author of historical nonfiction. Essex Dogs is the first of a trilogy, and I look forward to reading the next.