Book One of the Brethren of the Coast trilogy, featuring Thomas Marlowe
With the bounty from his years as a pirate
- a life he intends to renounce & keep forever secret
- Thomas Marlowe purchases a fine Virginia plantation from a beautiful young widow, Elizabeth Tinling. Soon afterwards, while defending her honour, he kills the favourite son of one of the colony's most powerful families in a duel. But in a clever piece of manoeuvring he manages to win command of the Plymouth Prize, the colony's decrepit guardship, & is charged with leading the King's sailors in bloody pitched battle against the cutthroats who infest the waters off Virginia's shores.
A threat from his illicit past appears, however, as an old pirate enemy plots to seize the colony's wealth, forcing Marlowe to choose between losing all
- or facing the one man he fears.