Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (January 2005)

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“The best historical novels ever written.” —New York Times Book Review

"Vividly detailed nineteenth-century settings and dramatic tension punctuated with flashes of wry humor make O'Brian's nautical adventure a splendid treat." —Publishers Weekly

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by dispatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attention of two privateers soon becomes menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination, as anything Patrick O’Brian has written.

About the Performer: Earphones Awards recipient SIMON VANCE was born in England and worked for the BBC for ten years as a radio-news announcer and also worked as a narrator for the Royal National Institute for the Blind in London. In addition to narrating for Blackstone Audiobooks, he involves himself in numerous stage-acting projects in the United States and Europe.