Sharpe's Eagle, by Bernard Cornwell (Richard Sharpe's Adventure Series)

Sharpe's Eagle
Bernard Cornwell

Richard Sharpe's Adventure Series

Jim and I have read two of the novels the Sean Bean/Darragh O'Malley movies were based on, and we can now assure you of two things. First, don't expect the books and the movies to bear much resemblance to each other. For instance, there is no Teresa, Sharpe's Portuguese lady love and later wife and mother of his daughter. None. Further, what happens in the movie is not quite what happens in the books. Second, the movies are good, but the books are terrific! Cornwell's version, the first versions, of course, are better plotted, better told, and just plain a better story. I asked him why they changed so much in the movies, and he told me he just plain doesn't know. It's a mystery to him as well.

Back to Sharpe's Eagle, Sharpe meets up with the odious Sir Henry Simmerson and his nephew, Gibbons, in this novel. Simmerson is a Member of Parliam ent and learned everything he knows about battle from books. He doesn't like actual experienced soldiers. He hates Sir Arthur Wellesley with a passion. He really, really can't stand Sharpe. Sharpe makes him look bad several times, first by probing he can turn the South Essex, Simmerson's regiment, into actual marksmen. He is Simmerson's scapegoat of convenience when that fine colonel manages to lose the Kings colors to the French and then promptly blows up a bridge so Sharpe and the South Essex can't get back. Sharpe's friend Lenox dies after getting Sharpe to agree to capture one of the French stabndards an Eagle. When Sharpe manages to run the French off, Simmerson decides to write to his cousin in the Horse Guards back in Whitehall and get Sharpe sent to the West Indies, where fever will almost surely kill him.

The brass are not fooled, but there is not much even Sir Arthur can do to protect Our Hero. Sharpe's plan to capture an Eagle is cemented by the fact that so doing will most likely trump Simmerson's influence. Off Wellesley and General "Daddy" Hill and their battalions go to Talavera to face the French. Sharpe rescues This Episode's Love Interest, Josefina, from nephew Gibbons, only to be rewarded by becoming her lover. Soon Sharpe has another promise to keep, for Gibbons and his buddy boy, Barry, beat and rape Josfina. Now he has to kill Giccons and Barry and get the Eagle. That's a lot to have on your to-do list while leading your men into one of those odds against you battles.

Simmerson decides at the behinning of said battle that he and the South Essex will withdraw to the rear. His reasoning is that they will be the only bit of the army left alive and somehow that will get him rewarded with a generalship. It has been satisfiying to watch Sharpe get the bugger's goat, but good old Simmerson is better at making fatal mistakes on his own.

Will Sharpe get the Eagle? Will he get revenge on Gibbons and Barry? Will he get to stay a captain? Will he get to keep the girl? You get to find out all on your own.

I suppose you want me to tell you what about the book was better than the movie. I can sum it up with "It was just a lot more satisfying." The characters are more interesting to watch. The plotting of the battles are simply more involving. More is left to the reader to imagine. If you haven't seen the movies or read the books yet, I recommend you watch the movies first. They are great fun, will get you acquainted with and involved in the characters, but then when you read the books you will really appreciate the original storytelling. If you read, then watch, you will spend your time yelling at the screen, "Vut that's not how it happened!" Trust me.

My husband read this book to me. It is available on Amazon, Amazon.co.uk, Kindle, Audible.com (unabridged), on Bookshare and is in process at the National Library Service.

Latest New Releases in Historical Fiction

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The Bluebells of Scotland
Laura Vosika

Highland warrior Niall Campbell and womanizing modern musician Shawn Kleiner, polar opposites in everything but looks, fall asleep at the top of a Scottish castle tower and wake up in the wrong centuries, caught in one another's lives. Book 1 of the Bluebells Trilogy.

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See Nan Hawthorne's Booking the Middle Ages for Villains, a guest post by Jeri Westerson in celebration of the release on September 29 of Serpent in the Thorns, the second Crispin Guest medieval noir.

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The Burning Land
Bernard Cornwell

Being release in the UK on October 1 and in the USA in January 2010. This link is on amazon.co.uk. Hey, I'm not willing to wait for the USA release!

The latest in the bestselling Alfred series from number one historical novelist, Bernard Cornwell. In the last years of the ninth century, King Alfred of Wessex is in failing health, and his heir is an untested youth. The Danes, who have failed so many times to conquer Wessex, smell opportunity! First comes Harald Bloodhair, a savage warrior leading a Viking horde, who is encouraged to cruelty by his woman, Skade.

But Alfred still has the services of Uhtred, his unwilling warlord, who leads Harald into a trap and, at Farnham in Surrey, inflicts one of the greatest defeats the Vikings were ever to suffer. This novel, the fifth in the magnificent series of England's history tells of the final assaults on Alfred's Wessex, that Wessex survived to become England is because men like Uhtred defeated an enemy feared throughout Christendom.

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The Healer
John Wright

For 500 years through The Middle Ages, Arabic, Persian, Indus and Chinese cultures flowered in a period of enlightenment, producing the best scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers and physicians.

In 1067, two men splash ashore into William the Conqueror's Britannia after 10 years of enslavement in a Silk Road Kingdom. Riennes de Montford, a Norman, returns a skilled Eastern physician at a time when Dark Age medicines used leeches, bleeding and magic potions. He and his brother, Haralde Longshield with their foreign ways, impact upon the lives of those they meet in their trek across the country to claim an estate in the Welsh March frontier of warlords, bandits and longbowmen.

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Check back often for the latest in new historical fiction!

Spotlight on Author Carola Dunn

Having failed history at school, I naturally gravitated to writing historical fiction. In 30 years I've written 52 books set in three different periods--32 Regencies, 18 Daisy Dalrymple mysteries, and 2 Cornish mysteries. You can read more about them on my website, www.geocities.com/CarolaDunn/ (if you hurry--geocities is closing down next month. I hope to have a new site up and running by then). I blog weekly (Tuesdays) at http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/. I'm also on Facebook--come and visit.

SHEER FOLLY, the 18th Daisy Dalrymple mystery (England 1920s), is just out from St Martin's Minotaur. Daisy and her friend Lucy go in search of England's best grotto for their book on follies (the architectural kind). To Lucy's dismay, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures now owns the associated stately home. The "plumber" has an odd collection of guests assembled: Julia, a schoolfriend of Daisy and Lucy, and her mother; a high-up civil servant and his socialite wife; the wife's lover, who is also Julia's suitor; and a mysterious Canadian. Add the plumber's snobbish sister-in-law and her son, and the situation becomes explosive. In fact, it explodes just in time for Daisy and Lucy's newly arrived husbands to watch the grotto blow up--with one of the guests inside.

BLACK SHIP, the 17th Daisy Dalrymple mystery, is now available in paperback. Daisy and her husband, DCI Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, move with their family to Hampstead. When their dog discovers a body in the shrubbery, they find themselves mixed up with American rumrunners, bootleggers, and gangsters, and an old acquaintance, a hapless Revenue agent they met in New York (The Case of the Murdered Muckraker).

Both are available from all bookstores, real and virtual.

The first three Daisy Dalrymple mysteries came out in the UK in August, 15 years after Daisy's first appearance in the USA. The titles are DEATH AT WENTWATER COURT, THE WINTER GARDEN MYSTERY, and REQUIEM FOR A MEZZO. The eighteenth in the series, BLACK SHIP, is out in the UK this month; the 19th, SHEER FOLLY, comes in November. All are published by Constable & Robinson and are available from the following online dealers (and can presumably be ordered from bookstores if they don't have them in stock):

http://www.bookstore.co.uk/
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/
http://www.waterstones.com/
http://www.whsmith.co.uk/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/

Use the Amazon.com search tool at the right to find out about availability in the U.S.

In Death at Wentwater Court, Daisy visits a stately home to write about it for her first- ever commissioned magazine article. The Earl of Wentwater has recently married a woman with a mysterious past, young enough to be his daughter, greatly upsetting his grown-up children. When a sinister guest is found floating amidst broken ice in the skating lake, the police assume it's an accident--until Daisy brings evidence of murder to the attention of DCI Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard.

In The Winter Garden Mystery, Daisy's writing about an ancient manor house in Cheshire when the body of a parlourmaid is dug up in the garden. The local police arrest a young gardener, but Daisy, convinced he's innocent, calls in her Scotland Yard pal, DCI Fletcher.

In Requiem for a Mezzo, Daisy and Alec attend a performance at the Royal Albert Hall. The starring mezzo-soprano, Daisy's neighbour, is poisoned on-stage in the middle of the performance. Alec's in charge of the investigation, but Daisy knows half the suspects (the mezzo's sister, husband, lover, rival) and can't help getting involved.

I haven't written any Regencies for a while, but they're all available now as ebooks at www.RegencyReads.com. Some are being reincarnated in large print editions, including MISS JACOBSON'S JOURNEY, a tale of adventure, smuggling gold across enemy France to the Duke of Wellington in Spain. It will be out in November from Thorndike (US) and Chivers (UK).

One more item of mini-news: my short story, "Miss Primrose and the March of Progress," originally published in an ezine, is now available FREE, GRATIS and FOR NOTHING, along with two Daisy short stories (from print anthologies), "Storm in a Tea Shoppe" and "Unhappy Medium," at www.BelgraveHouse.com.

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Thanks Carola! Would you like a spotlight on your work on That's All She Read? Let us know.

The Belt of Gold, by Cecelia Holland

The Belt of Gold
Cecelia Holland

I couldn't pass up a novel about a Germanic warrior in Byzantium. After all, I had thoroughly enjoyed Michael Ennis's Byzantium about Harald Hadrada as a Verangian officer. Trouble is, The Belt of Gold started to sound like the Cliff's Notes version of that very book in short order. The earthy Germanic noble, the flighty and mysterious Byzantine lady in wait to the Empress, the dashing athletic prince and his corrupt uncle, the empress herself, seemingly invincible but constantly threatened by those who believed only a man can be an emperor, and the bad guy.. there was a bad guy in Byzantium, I'm sure, though I don't recall him. And the heir to the throne who gets his eyes put out to spoik his chances.. that too. And the Conan like hero goes home afterward, with his lady love ever in his heart.

Yep, the same basic elements. For the record, Holland's book was published much the longer ago. The main difference in the books, besides the later book being grander and sexy, is that Byzntium took place in the mid 11th century and the protagonist is historical and The Belt of Gold takes place in exactly 802. Harald died at Stamford Bridhe in 1066 along with his ally Tostig Godwinson and Hagen... well he went home to Frankland to grumble about the relatively low birth of his own king, Charlegagne.

In The Belt of Gold the heroine, Theaphano, causes the murder of Hagen's brother when bad guys kill him looking for a list that the Empress Irene doesn't want stolen. That means Hagen has to stay in Byzantium and not go home to Frankland until he has avenged his brother's death. He goes to work for Irene and falls in love with Thephano. The bad guy does everything he can to get his hands on this list, which turns out to be a list of his own allies who are, so he supposes, are actually in league with Irene. In the meantime, Hagen kicks butt and takes names and generally impresses everyone. In comes a holy man whose unmeaning mistake brings all the plots to a head. And all along the charioteers and their horses go round and round the Hippodrome. That's the belt of gold in the title.. the prize for the champion.

For all I am making extreme light of The Belt of Gold it was definitely an entertaining novel and educational in its way. This is, one assumes, quite a while before the Verangian guard came into being, though poor old Irene could've used more than just one Schwarzeneggar clone.
The novel's best feature is all the twists and turns of its, well, Byzantine plot. Let's just say calling any individual "the bad guy" must be done advisedly.

I read the book on cassettes from the National Library Service. I doubt it can be found in any other form except as a used paperback.

The Disorderly Knights, by Dorothy Dunnett - Lymond Chronicles

The Disorderly Knights
Dorothy Dunnett

Lymond Chronicles

Lymond, Lymond, Lymond... whatever are we going to do with you?

The Disorderly Knights is the third book of Dorothy Dunnett's tantalizing Lymond Chronicles which follow the career of Francis Crawford of Lymond, a Scots nobleman and easily the most fascinating, perplexing, infuriating, moving protagonist i have ever read.

In this novel, Francis agrees to go to Malta to warn the Knights of Malta that the Turkish fleet is really coming to get them, no kidding. The trouble is that the Grand Master, a Spaniard, refuses to believe him or the French Marshall who came with him because he thinks it's a trick of the French king. Sure enough, the Turks arrive and promptly start attacking and killing. Francis meets the superhuman Gabriel, a knight of so much personal beauty, piety and charisma that it seems he can do anything and certainly no wrong. This Gabriel starts a campaign of his own to woo Francis to join the Knights. Anyone who has read this far in in the Chronicles knows this ain't gonna happen, but it's fun to watch him try. Francis goes with Gabriel to Tripoli to help defend it when the Turks turn their attention there. To complicate matters for Francis, his recent paramour, Oona O'Dwyer, is in the line of attack. Tripoli falls, Oona is presumed dead but we know she isn't and is in fact carrying Francis's child. And that Gabriel knows it and is up to something.

Back in Scotland Francis meets Gabriel's sister, Joleta, perhaps the most lovely fifteen year old girl in Europe. Convent bred, she seems as sweet as she is beautiful, until Francis is snotty to her and her quick and violent temper show themselves. Francis's new project is to develop a crack mercenary force, which, despite its obviously secular and commercial purpose, attracts several of the Knights of Malta, including Gabriel, exiled by the Grand Master for losing Tripoli. Francis's stated aim for the little army is to keep peace on the border with England and to remain utterly independent of all other control, whether the Queen Dowager, the Knights of Malta, the exiled Knights of Malta, the French, you name it. Gabriel keeps insisting he doesn't want to take over, but...

Like the first two in the Lymond Chronicles, this novel is about Francis being accused of this, that and the other perfidy, a few of which he actually committed, and how he painstakingly clears himself to Gabriel's disadvantage. It is taut, clever, complex and will probably require a second reading to track it all.

The most expressive way I can describe my feelings about The Disorderly Knights is to say that as I read my eyes got wider and wider and my jaw dropped lower and lower with the astonishment of it all. A friend of mine named Mario Rupps first told me about this series, and our emails back and forth as I read the volumes are full of ineffectual attempts to say just what it is about these books that is so magnificent. We both want to strangle Francis half the time. he is something of a cross between a superhero and Oscar Wilde. But ultimately you don't reach for his throat because you know in the end you will understand and agree with what he chose to do.

On a scale of one to five I rate The Disorderly Knights and all the other Lymond Chronicles a ten.

I read this book on cassettes from the National Library Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. It is also available in hardback and paperback, on audio cassette, CD and download from Audible.com, on amazon.co.uk, but not on Kindle, BookShare.org or, as far as I can tell, in translation. See links on the right.

The Abbot's Gibbet, by Michael Jecks (A IKnights Templar Mystery)

The Abbot's Gibbet
Michael Jecks

A Knights Templar Mystery

I was so glad to find this Knights Templar mystery by Michael Jecks on Kindle as I had been stymied in my quest to this point. None of Jecks' many, many medieval mysteries has been recorded by the National Library Services for the Blind and Handicapped. Not one. But I am gratefully saved.

The hero of the Knights Templar mysteries is Sir Baldwin, a former Templar out of a job when the Pope and the King of France disbanded the order of the Church Militant in order to avoid paying debts to them and to seize all their wealth. It's bad enough to lose a job you really love, or even to do so on trumped up charges, but imagine losing that job while watching your colleagues, many of them dear to you, tortured and burned at the sake. Sir Baldwin is understandably bitter, cynical and interested in seeing uncorrupted justice done.

In The Abbot's Gibbet Sir Baldwin is visiting an annual fair in Tavistock with his friend Sir Simon and Simon's matchmaking wife Margaret. The two Sirs are called in to hellp solve the mystery of the death and subsequent beheading of an unknown man the very night before the fair's start. Numerous robberies of merchant's stalls by a monk, then the death, apparently by suicide of another monk, break up the monotony of Baldwin's growing interest in a woman named Jean, a friend of Simon's and Margarets'. The story is complicated by several subplots, some of which come together in the end. A merchant's daughter falls for a Venetian trader. A whiny cook helps hide the identity of his reputedly outlawed brother. A young monk decides to leave the monastery because he is in love with that same merchant's daughter. The Venetians, father and son, are suspected of foul deeds. A friar raging against mammon and bankers and profits taxes the patience of all. Contract security guards hired for the duration of the fair set up and enforce a protection racket. And everyone, including the reader, is waiting to see who ends up dangling from The Abbot's Gibbet.

This is a thoroughly satisfying if not brilliant murder mystery. It manages to set forth enough confusing detail to make it a challenge to solve, but a fun one. There are some logical jumps during the investigations, such as concluding the slain monk could not have thrown the cudgel across the alley, or that it was even his. One serious storyline involving the identity of a little girl saved years before by one of the suspects is only half resolved at the end, making me wonder if both characters are meant to turn up in sequels.

The two greatest virtues of this novel are, I think, the distinctly drawn and interesting characters and the detail of the town and its fair. I found the latter fascinating, full of details about how the stalls were set up and organized, what items were for sale and how they were prepared and packaged, and numerous other administrative and practical aspects that were worth reading the book all by themselves.

As I mentioned, I read this book on my Kindle2. It is also available in hardback and paperback, all thee can be found here. It is not available from NLS nor BookShare.

Sharpe's Havoc, by Bernard Cornwell (Richard Sharpe Adventure Series)

Sharpe's Havoc
Bernard Cornwell

Richard Sharpe Adventure Series #7 - Campaign in Northern Portugal, Spring 1809

This is only the seventh book in the Richard Sharpe Adventure Series if you line them all up in chronological order by battles. I suspect Sharpe's Havoc was written after the three India, one shipboard and one Denmark novels were written, themselves a jump back fromn 1814 to 1798 and soon after to fill in Sharpe's early years. Sharpe's Havoc provides a place for Cornwell to tie up a loose end or two and acknowledge events, like the battles in India, the surprising presence of Sharpe at Trafalgar, the sad love story of of Copenhagen and even sadder love story of lady Grace. Personally I founed it satisfying to have all those dramatic events taken into account in Sharpe's life.

In Sharpe's Havoc our boys find themselves in Portugal with Captain Hogan, assigned to look for a missing British wine merchant's daughter and, with Hogan's arch insinuation, "to keep an eye on Christopher". Christopher is a Foreign Office operative assigned to feel out the Portuguese attitude towards the French invasion of their country. He has decided he has a higher calling, to manipulate relations within and without the the French leading officers to create peace between the three nations. Our Christopher has more than a little larceny in him, as he plans to marry the wine merchant's daughter, Kate, and get hold of her late father's company, and then some. I felt that Hogan suspected something, but if so, he certainly did not get that across to Sharpe who trusts the guy for an awfully long time. I kept shouting at the book, "Send someone to warn Hogan, for God's sake!" My exhortations did not help.

Sharpe almost obeys Hogan's other suggestion, not to fall in love with Kate. There is one kiss, then the book ends with someone else with her in his arms, implying I suppose that he gets the girl, not Sharpe. The novel starts with the French capture of Oporto, follows Sharpe and his rifles to a standstill in a small Portuguese town where he sits more or less idle while Christopher is off doing his dirty tricks. When Our Hero finally figures out he's been duped, it is almost too late. Her, Harper, Hagman, Tongue, Perkins and Harris, and the rest, as they say on Gilligan's Island, withstand the siege of a hill fort before Christopher and the French give up and head for Oporto with an unhappy Kate and not before murdering literally everyone in the small town. In a dramatic battle at a seminary the British now under the general command of good old Nosey, Sir Arthur Wellesley, retake the seaport and send the French scrambling for the Spanish border. It is of course Sharpe's official mission to stop the French from escaping and his private mission to kill Christopher, retrieve his stolen telescope, and presumably Kate.

The novel begins on a bridge and ends on a bridge. You can tell this is is a bridge in itself, written later than the earliest novels. For one thing, all the catch up and fill in. But also because it is even better written than those first Sharpe adventures. Cornwell wrote dozens of other novels in between, and it really shows. This is as smooth and mature a Sharpe novel as there is. Other than instances where I wanted to give Sharpe a blow upside the head for obtuseness, this is as satisfying a Sharpe novel as there are. It has all the anticipated treasures, battle, courtship, Sharpe's struggle to be a proper officer, the growing comradeship of the key rifles, and Sharpe's self-actualized comments and actions. Christopher says to him, "We are England. We don't assassinate." Sharpe replies, "I do."

My husband, Jim, as wild a fan of Cornwell as I am, after all my long and patient evangelism, read Sharpe's Havoc to me. It is available in hardback, paperback, and even a leather bound edition, on Kindle, and on audio VD and download. For blind and otherwise print impaired readers, you can find it at BookShare.org and from the National Library Service via your local library in cassette form as RC 58259 and download as DB 58259. This is not one of the novels made into a film.

The Religion, by Tim Willocks (Tannhauser Trilogy)

The Religion
Tim Willocks

Tannhauser Trilogy

Tim Willocks' The Religion is a monumental work about the 1565 Siege of Malta by the forces of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Malta had become the home of the Knights of St. John the Baptist, the Hospitallers, after this same sultan drove them from their former home on Rodes. From Malta, as from Rhodes, the Knights, monks part of the Church Militant, harried and interrupted the Sultan's and his allies' Mediterranean trade at sea. Now the Sultan planned to destroy the Knights for once and for all.

Into the middle of this sails Matthias Tannhauser who, as a young boy was taken from his village in Germany by Ottoman forces bent on taking over Europe. There is so much background on this and further adventures that I thought for sure this must be the third book of the promised trilogy, but unless Willocks goes back and fills in with the two books to come, the complexities of Tannhauser's life will go unillustrated save for the memories he keeps to himself. I must admit that I feel Willocks packed just too much into those memories. The author is a psychiatrist, so I will assume the purpose of this was to explain the reason for Matthias' choices in this book.

Matthias is a gentleman adventurer, a merchant, something of a pirate, who, with his best buddy Bors of Carlyle is hired by Lady Carla and her mysterious companion Amparu to Malta to help the former find her long lost son. Carla, a native of Mdina in Malta, had an affair at fifteen with a priest, had the child torn from her arms when he abandoned her, and was married off to an Aquitainian geezer who promptly died. You soon learn that the people who were entrusted with raising her son, Orlando, did nothing of the sort, and we meet him on the docks where he has survived since he was small.

The bulk of the story is about the siege of the fortresses of the Knights, who with a minimal force compared to the Sultan's tens of thousands, do their best to hold fast. The fortress of St. Elmo falls to the enemy, with the sacrifice of every man in it, save the redoubtable Matthias. Then bit by bit the enemy destroys the heavily fortified bastions of the Knights. Matthias, who is fighting alongside the Knights, is biding his time until he and his entourage and the boy can escape the island. He is also falling in love with both women, elegant Carla who is finding her own valor as a tireless nurse for the hundreds of wounded, and Amparu, who makes glorious love with Matthias in his bathtub and bed and whose clairvoyance tells her more about the future than she wants to know. perhaps the most amazing thing about this novel is that it has a happy ending of sorts.

This is one helluva long book. The story is told well, though its characters are a tad too stock. Matthias is the scoundrel with a heart of gold, his friend Bors is the lovable hedonist, Carla is the embodiment of the Madonna, the villain Ludocvio is the good man who does evil because he thinks it is what God wants him to do, and the boy Orlando is the untouched and ever optimistic innocent who is the redemption of all. The most interesting character, to me at least, is Amparu, simultaneously ethereal and earthy. It may be that in fact the archetypes with which this novel is rife makes it a better novel than it might have been.

If Willocks set out to show the more disgusting side of war he managed it and then would not let it rest. This is a disgusting book. I mean that literally. The battle scenes and much of the rest of the book is full of filth, from blood to vomit to feces blanketing everything and everybody. In one scene a man who has just speared an enemy soldier with his pike lowers his pants and poops on the ramparts, then pulls up his pants and finishes killing the guy. I am not someone who uses the word "gratuitous" in regard to sex, violence and gore very often, but I don't hesitate to use it here.

One tiny anachronism drove me nuts. The weaponry in the novel is well researched and authentic, but Willocks keeps calling Matthias' musket a rifle. A rifle is not a generic for firearms but a new technological advance that simplty had not come about yet. Maybe I am the only person that griped, but there it is.

In the most general terms this novel is about how religion and God, be he Jehovah or Allah, are used to fulfill the various greeds of human beings, but how real grace need not be sacrificed when banishing religion from faith. This conflict and its resolution touches all the central characters, with a round of redemption all around.

If there are two more books to follow, I wonder what Willocks will do with the conclusion of this one. It seems like tragedy will be the only possibility.

I read this book as an audio download that I transferred to my Kindle2.

Now I have restarted Dorothy Dunnett's The Disorderly Knights which takes place on Malta fourteen years prior. I will have to get used to how the narrator pronounces place names that i got used to sounding a different way in the book I just finished. I am glad I read the later book first, as the likelihood that I will run into the same characters from history who have not yet met their apotheosis will be easier to take than the opposite.