When Sea Trials begins, Captain Tom King and his French lover, Aimee Silva, are passengers on the St. George, a privately owned warship escorting a small fleet of East India Company merchant ships to Cape Town, where King's ship, the frigate HMS Mistral, is completing a massive refit and is ready for a test run at sea. Unfortunately, the French have other ideas, and the lightly guarded fleet is too ripe to resist.

Despite King's best efforts -- since St. George's true master is no fighting man and a drunk to boot -- the sloop catches fire and explodes, leaving her crew and passengers on two small and dangerously overcrowded boats. Tom and Aimee are separated, and as the months pass, both assume the other is dead.

Not so. Both were rescued -- Tom by a British merchant ship, whose captain agrees to ferry him to Cape Town, and Aimee by one of the French ships that had attacked them. Their paths from that point on diverge sharply.

Aimee, who is pregnant, believes that the father of her unborn child was killed in the explosion, and she finds herself bonding with the surgeon on the French frigate on which she and others from St. George are prisoners. Tom, meanwhile, takes up his command of Mistral -- after ousting an unfit captain who was appointed in his absence -- and uses the ship's sea trials as an excuse to search for Aimee. Eventually, he crosses paths with a French corvette involved in the attack on St. George all those months before....

Alaric Bond writes great stories, with compelling characters that move in and out of his protagonist's orbit. King, as always, is the central figure in the book, but he's surrounded by interesting people -- some, like Richard Banks, who has been a key figure throughout this series but plays only a minor role here, and others, like Midshipman Martin, who joins the Mistral crew and conceals a debilitating condition from his captain and crewmates. Although not main characters, they -- along with others, such as Croft and Cooper, Adams and Summers, Anderson and Russell, Manning and McIver, and many more -- are written in a way that makes them familiar and of immediate concern to readers. It's amazing that Bond can juggle so many characters and make them all distinct, engaging and real to the story.

Bond is no slouch when it comes to action, either. The sequence where the Mistral is grounded on an uncharted rock with a French ship approaching will keep readers glued to the page.

I read a lot of nautical fiction, and few long-running series can hold my attention like Bond's Fighting Sail books. This is the 12th in the series, and Bond shows no sign of slowing down. Let's hope he doesn't run out of ideas any time soon!

[ visit Alaric Bond online ]