JasonKoivu

Now we're talkin', yo! Badass mo-fo, Richard Sharpe gets back to what he does best: kickin' ass and lovin' the ladies! Oooh yeah!

I don't know what Bernard Cornwell was thinking with that last book in the Sharpe series (#4, Sharpe's Trafalgar)...Well okay, I do know. He wanted to write a book about one of Britain's most famous battles ever, Nelson's victory at Trafalgar. Problem is, it was a naval victory and Cornwell's Napoleonic War hero Sharpe is in the army. So the author plopped his character on a boat and floated him out to sea. Like a human in water, predictably he soon started to flounder about. Not able to "breathe" like he does on land, his movements were waterlogged, thus the action is stymied and the story sank.

However, in Sharpe's Prey Cornwell puts his rough-and-ready army officer back on land where he belongs. Number five in the series is centered around Britain's somewhat forgotten attack on Denmark early in the war in order to claim the country's valuable fleet before the French got their hands on it. It is an ignoble smudge in an otherwise gallant, almost chivalric war for England, but Cornwell is able to cut a sympathetic figure out of his man Sharpe, who infiltrates Copenhagen to fight a personal, behind-the-scenes war of his own with a traitorous thief.

Predictably Sharpe finds and falls in love with a beautiful woman, and likewise he ends up deeper and deeper in the shit to the point where you're racking your noggin trying to figure out how in the heck he's going to get out of this scrape, and I mean that very literally this time (if you're claustrophobic you're going to squirm a bit.) This is not high-art literature. It's solid writing and a damn good action/adventure, with Cornwell at his finest.