Hold Fast

A desperate sea battle; a fortune risked on the turn of a card; a duel at dawn with the loser . . . Patrick O'Brian meets James Bond.The year is 1803, and the British Secret Service is contending with a belligerent France under Napoleon. The service suffers a blow in the loss of a prime agent, Thomas Grey, who—despondent at his wife's untimely death—resigns from British Intelligence and departs England for Boston, where he intends to become a lumber merchant. His plan to start a new life is thrown abruptly off course when a French intelligence network attempts to recruit him as an informer, and, in the process, exposes a grave new threat to Britain that Grey can't ignore. Confronting it seems likely to grant the grief-stricken widower a chance of extracting a personal revenge.A relentlessly paced and vividly imagined spy tale, Hold Fast will delight and entertain fans of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels, Bernard Cornwell's...