The Angry Tide (Poldark)

Metaphorically The Angry Tide is a novel well-named. This is the watershed volume in the series, and also the one that breaks from the eighteenth-century which readers of Poldark had heretofore known, and brings to conclusion many storylines, situations....and characters. Death is more plentiful in this Poldark book than in any other, if not in all others combined. Several central figures do not survive this story, and one who is lost here is not only someone known from the series' start, but a person surely everyone had thought truly irreplaceable: which this person was, for the series is never the same afterward, nor is the shadow cast by this figure's death ever absent in the five books that bring Poldark to its 1820 conclusion. In The Angry Tide, Captain Ross Poldark, a man of independent thought, is elected a member of parliament for the borough of Truro, Cornwall, and he and Demelza travel by coach across the breadth of England, arriving in a London splendidly described by Winston Graham. (After the chapter that sets the characters firmly in the capital, you'll feel as if you've just taken a guided tour of the world's largest city in the concluding years of the 1700's.) In London, Ross and Demelza settle in only to be swept up into the tide of political life and intrigue, as the nation gossips of little else besides the new man of the hour, whose reputation as a master of warfare carries his name fearfully to every mind: Napoleon Bonaparte. Elsewhere, Elizabeth, desperate to heal the rift in her marriage to George, takes the most drastic step imaginable and consults with a famed foreign obstetrician, intend on inducing premature birth of the child she carries, hoping a second premature delivery might lay to rest George's doubts about his being the father of her son, Valentine. In another marriage in the series, the portly, despicable Reverend Osborne Whitworth, far from a sinless clergyman, rediscovers the charms of a more than willing substitute for his psychologically traumatized wife Morwenna, and in so doing gets more than he could ever have bargained for. And lastly in London, the calculating George Warleggan befriends a sadistic former infantry officer, a man who loves killing and fears no one, a celebrated marksman who has emerged the victor in many past duels, and whose lust for Demelza---and distaste for Ross---comes to a head with pistols at dawn in one of the city's parks...