The Baltic Gambit

It is 1801 and Captain Alan Lewrie of the Royal Navy finally stands trial--or at least hear what the judge decides about the validity of the travesty of a trial in Jamaica where he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging and to present their own side of things through testimony and argument. He's got his anti-slavery supporters who have retained a young but successful lawyer and he's been lionized in the press for months in order to gain sympathy for the cause (of the abolition of slavery... and perhaps to sway opinion toward Lewrie's case). Although getting his neck stretched has been a large cause for concern to Lewrie over the last long while, even worse is that he's also lost his ship and old crew on the HMS Savage and fears he's going to be cast up ashore forever. Which is made a bit worse by his wife Caroline having decided that any reconciliation was just one on (last book). The "retired" spymaster Twigg has smoked out the poison pen writer, however, and Lewrie goes about getting some revenge. There's news of Nelson and others preparing for some sort of action in the Baltic and Lewrie definitely wants in on it. Fortune favors him when a captain is invalided and Lewrie step onto a new ship people by the other captain's crew... Quite a chunk of the tale takes place on land, but a trial for your life and a peek into the peculiarities of the legal system make for some suspense (well, SOME! One suspects that Lewrie's tale won't end with a trip to the gallows just yet, of course), and the same lively descriptions and interesting characters and humor that has made the rest of the series so amusing to read. And of course it was good to be back aboard ship again in the second half of the tale--this time with Lewrie dressed up something close to an Eskimo due to the cold (idiosyncratic as always, Lewrie is). This is the 15th book in the series and to paraphrase one of the reviews, I am thoroughly addicted to this series. There are weaker and stronger books, but all are a rousing good time to read, with the joy of the ship-board life and intensity of battle and no few hazards on land make things adventure-filled. And Lewrie's character remains charmingly flawed even as he ages, making him a good sort of fellow to wish to read about. I can't wait to read the next!

Its the expected good yarn about our Alan, but its downright cruel to let the reader hang after flipping to the last pages to see if Caroline and Alan will kiss and make up? Come on Mr. Lambdin, don't let us faithful readers hang there too long. Wolf de Vallette

I look forward to each new book as this series appears and, as ever, The Baltic Gambit does not disappoint. Much of the action takes place ashore -- it is almost 200 pages before Lewrie gets a ship, and 300+ pages before a gun is fired in anger -- but I enjoyed reading about Lewrie's time in London. Lambdin provides this pleasure on several levels. One the one hand, Alan Lewrie continues to grow and mature. (Of course, he is pushing 40.) As the story moves through Lewrie's courtroom victory over the odious Beauman family, he actually begins to tire of nightly bacchanals and starts to rise early and read seriously about world affairs (providing the author with an excellent way to provide geo-political context to the modern reader.) While not entirely immune to feminine charms and entanglements, he eschews the damn-the-consequences rutting of his younger days. He even makes efforts to curb the most flagrant of his excesses in deference the the straight-laced, proto-Victorian abolitionists who sponsored his defense. On the other hand, Lambdin's confident mastery of place and time has the reader wide-eyed and avid every time Lewrie sets out from his lodgings. High and low, rich and poor, honest folk and scoundrels, King's English and rogues' cant -- we meet a colorful and varied set of characters at every turn. On the final hand, we are treated to Lambdin's sly narratorial voice. The book is narrated from the conventionally strict third-person omniscient point of view. Except. Except, Chapter Six opens with these words: "The Admiral Boscawen Coffee House, at the corner of Oxford Street and Orchard Street (site of the present day Selfridge's)..." Wow! This sole explicit intrusion of the 21st Century into the book colors the whole story. It tells us that we must drop all pretense that perspective is limited to 1801. Suspend disbelief at your own risk, reader -- you have been warned that you'll need to be looking through two lenses at the same time: Alan Lewrie's from 1801 and Dewey Lambdin's puckish view from 2009. At one point, Lewrie muses about an abolitionist who cares nothing for the suffering of slaves because his sole object is to tear the United States apart. (After all, the North and South are sure to be at each other's throats if slavery is abolished.) I can almost hear that 21st Century narrator chortling over his own cleverness. Once Lewrie gets his ship, the frigate Thermopylae, we settle with a happy sigh into enjoying Lambdin's peerless passages of ship handling and fighting. Lewrie's cruise in the Baltic is, like the best of his adventures, ambiguous. The naval mission is combined with a "diplomatic" task, arranged by his shadowy mentor, Zachariah Twigg. The story culminates with a fine fictional account of the Battle of Copenhagen, including Nelson famously turning the blind eye and a cameo appearance by William "Breadfruit" Bligh. As always, we are left wondering about several unresolved threads which Lambdin promises to take up in

The complex, and less than perfect characters in this series, always make for a fun read!

the next adventures of alan lewrie, cant wait for the next one, this one was very good