In this swashbuckling debut adventure, a young girl witnesses the brutal murder of her father but ultimately grows up to be an influential and beloved 16th-century seafarer. 

Mary isn’t afraid of blood. She grew up with a butcher for a father and, after personally slaying one of his assassins the night of his murder, becomes something of an expert on the subject. After the man she has always assumed to be merely her elderly guardian bequeaths her a substantial sum from his deathbed, young Mary buys her first ship for smuggling purposes and begins her transformation into “Lady Mary,” a respected captain, lover of crewmate James Hunter, and treasure finder (as the trope goes, crossed palm trees mark the spot). As she later tells the queen of England in what becomes an extended narrative flashback, she’s not afraid to commandeer a vessel or two, especially if the captain of that vessel tries to interfere with her. After easily dispatching a fellow named Dowlin, she finds some quite cantankerous and surprisingly tough adversaries in the form of the Twins, “the Devil’s own offspring.” Will Lady Mary come out on top again, or will the Twins finally capsize this butcher’s daughter? With excellent pacing and a fondness for darkened tavern scenes, parlays at sea, and below-deck ravishings, the book is a pleasurable and action-packed read that caters heavily to the swashbuckling genre. The fact that Lady Mary is a woman adds a delicious spin to the otherwise tired clichés of male captains and their bosomy babes. In this case, Mary’s lover, Hunter, may not be the sharpest pencil in the pack, but he’s good at satisfying her, a role normally occupied by a hapless wench. Mary’s fraught back story lends her character an emotional resonance, and the joy of the open seas—as well as the danger churning below—pulses throughout this rip-roaring, hearty tale of the high seas.

Opens with a gripping scene of murder, then careens through betrayal, piracy, passion, and treasure galore.

A famous pirate captain tangles with the Dutch East India Company in this final volume of a swashbuckling adventure trilogy.

It’s been a year since the legendary Irish pirate Capt. Bloody Mary was swept from the deck of her ship, Phantom, during a freak storm off Florida. Since then, her young protégé, Elizabeth Cortés, has taken her place as the head of Mary’s crew. After failing to bring in the sort of haul Mary usually managed, Elizabeth outfits the crew members with a new flagship—the Ghostrunner—and enlists them in an emerging Dutch venture in the Far East. Sailing for “the Company” means transporting spices instead of stealing gold, but the work turns out to be just as dangerous. Elizabeth makes the mistake of trusting a Macau sea lord named Féng Wú and soon finds her small fleet decimated by Chinese pirates and their Portuguese allies. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Mary returns from the dead. Pulled from the sea by Tequesta fishermen, she’s betrayed by sailors, sold into slavery, rescued by the Cimarrons of Panama, and eventually makes her way back to Ireland. When she hears of Elizabeth’s deal with the Company, she immediately strikes out to find her ships and her sailors—or whatever is left of them. McMillin’s prose—which alternates in perspective between Elizabeth and Mary—is muscular and direct. Here, Mary finds herself arrested and imprisoned immediately upon her arrival in Amsterdam: “My predicament appeared bleak. But I did not panic. I refused to give my captors the satisfaction. The Dutch left me tied to the chair for the night within reach of a privy bucket, a loaf of bread and a jug of water. I whittled away the hours deep in thought, plotting my escape.” The novel is paced like an adventure movie, filled with sea battles, colorful bit players, and double crosses, and readers will feel as though they have circumnavigated the globe several times by the end of it. There isn’t much dimension to these characters or their schemes, but fans of the golden age of Piracy will appreciate the verve with which McMillin replicates its milieu.

A rousing, sprawling yarn about two indefatigable pirate women.

McMillin (The Butcher’s Daughter, 2015, etc.) continues the story of the fictional pirate-queen Bloody Mary in this swashbuckling sequel.

In the previous installment, things had just begun to look up for Lady Mary, the smuggler leader and the illegitimate heir to an Irish royal line. Shortly after helping defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588—and thus repaying a debt she owed to Queen Elizabeth I—Mary and her crew killed the leaders of a rival smuggler clan, the Síol Faolcháin. Unfortunately, this victory begets tragedy when Kayne Dowlin, the leader of the Síol Faolcháin survivors, ambushes the now-pregnant Mary in a remote mill, murdering her lover, James Hunter. Later, after leaving her newborn daughter in the hands of friends, Mary sets out to reassemble her crew and reacquire her ships before checking in with her patron, the queen. Elizabeth suggests that Mary join the massive retaliatory expedition that Sir Francis Drake and Sir Black John Norreys are planning against Spain. For both Mary and Elizabeth, the order of the day is lex talionis, the law of retaliation—an eye for an eye, or, as Mary prefers it, “blood for blood.” But as Mary well knows, revenge is a dangerous pursuit, and it will take her from the Iberian peninsula to the New World and back to Ireland. McMillin’s prose, as narrated by Mary, is as full of romance and swagger as one would expect in a tale of a pirate captain: “A biting wind ripping across the harbor cut into my bones as I walked my horse down the narrow streets of the old Barbican Quarter where Drake was using the home of a wealthy merchant as his headquarters.” The author’s aim seems to be to transport Mary to as many colorful locales as possible, and he certainly does so over the course of this book. Although the characters that surround her are all pretty stock, the novel upholds the fine tradition of old high-seas adventure stories with a pace that doesn’t let up until the final cutlass clatters to the deck.

A purely entertaining adventure novel of a fearless woman in a most dangerous line of work.