James L. Nelson

Acclaimed, award-winning author James L. Nelson—praised as “a master of both his period and the English language” by Patrick O’Brian—returns to the world of sea and sail in The French Prize....

Captain Isaac Biddlecomb is bound for Philadelphia with his wife and child in the Continental brig Charlemagne. His orders are to take command of the newly built twenty-gun frigate Falmouth and get her out to sea before she is taken by General Richard Howe’s invading army....

Fed up with an outlaw existence, Calico Jack Rackam swears off the pirate life, but he hasn’t reckoned with Anne Bonny, a woman who would as soon stab a man as give him a good tumble—that is, unless he’s a pirate. Soon Jack finds himself out on the high seas again....

Shortly after Thomas Marlowe's arrival in Williamsburg, Virginia, all in that newfound capital city are speaking his name. With the bounty from his years as a pirate—a life he intends to renounce and keep forever secret—he purchases a fine plantation from a striking young widow....

For centuries the Vikings have swept out of the Norse countries and fallen on whatever lands they could reach aboard their longships, and few could resist the power of their violent onslaught....

More than one hundred years after Columbus blundered onto Hispaniola, the West Indies are held in Spain's iron fist, and no threat to that absolute rule is tolerated. But such total control cannot last, and one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers....

Eager to return to his native Norway, Thorgrim agrees to participate in one last raid under the command of a man he does not trust....

April 12, 1861. With one jerk of a lanyard, one shell arching into the sky, years of tension exploded into civil war. And for those men who did not know in which direction their loyalty called them, it was a time for decisions....

With the flash of cutlass and the roar of cannon fire, this sweeping saga of high-seas adventure continues—as the revolutionaries’ fight for freedom explodes into all-out war....

As the War of Independence begins in earnest, American merchant seamen prepare to strike the first blows. None strikes more deftly than Isaac Biddlecomb, captain of the Judea, whose smuggling activities are making a mockery of His Majesty’s Royal Navy....

Thorgrim Night Wolf and his men, hunkered down behind their ad hoc defenses and facing off against the powerful army of Æthelwulf, king of Wessex, must find some means to continue their voyage home. But Æthelwulf, too, is trapped, unable to set sail on his pilgrimage to Rome....

With their longships storm-blown to the southern coast of Engla-land, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his men find themselves rich with plunder and safely ensconced in a priory called Christchurch. But that cannot last. Thorgrim, in a wolf dream, has seen the enemy armies closing in....

Driven ashore on the coast of Ireland, their longships nearly wrecked by the gods who seem unwilling to let them leave, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his band of Northmen once again face a fight for their survival....

In a blind rage, King James, ex-slave and now Marlowe's comrade in arms, slaughters the crew of a slave ship and makes himself the most wanted man in Virginia. The governor gives Marlowe a choice....

In 1706, war still rages in Europe, and the tobacco planters of the Virginia colony's tidewater struggle against shrinking markets and pirates lurking off the coast. But American seafarers have found a new source of wealth: the Indian Ocean and ships carrying treasure to the great Mogul of India....

Having survived the bloody Battle of New Orleans and the loss of their ironclad Yazoo River, captain Samuel Bowater, engineer Hieronymus Taylor, and the survivors of their crew are given new orders—take command of an ironclad warship being built in Memphis, Tennessee....

With the Spanish Empire brutally driving the buccaneers from their hunting grounds, the half-wild men must look for a new refuge in the West Indies. They find it just a few miles off the northwest coast of Hispaniola: the island of Tortuga.

With their ill-fated raid on the monastary at Glendalough torn apart by betrayal and defeat, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his handful of survivors from the crew of Sea Hammer....

Thorgrim Night Wolf, now somewhere on the south coast of Engla-land, may be closer to his goal of returning home than he has been since reaching Ireland years before, but he is still very, very far away....

Having recovered from the wounds of battle and having won for himself a fortune, a crew, and a longship, Thorgrim Night Wolf makes ready to leave for Norway....