Major Richard Sharpe awaits the opening shots of the army's Vitoria campaign with grim expectancy in this 17th book of his chronicles, from 1985. Victory depends on the increasingly fragile alliance between Britain and Spain-an alliance that must be maintained at any cost. But Sharpe's enemy Pierre Ducos seizes a chance to both destroy the alliance and take a personal revenge on Sharpe. And when the lovely spy, La Marquesa, takes a hand in the game, Sharpe finds himself caught in a web of deadly intrigue and becomes a fugitive, hunted by enemy and ally alike. Bernard Cornwell grew up with the Hornblower novels, following C.S. Forester's fictional hero through Lord Nelson's navy during the Napoleonic wars, and created his army counterpart in Richard Sharpe, a rifleman in Lord Wellington's land campaign. Cornwell has produced 24 novels and stories in the series, which traces Sharpe's career from 1799 and the Siege of Seringapatam in India to an encounter with the exiled Napoleon himself in 1821, and inspired the British television series Sharpe, starring Sean Bean.
