SHARPE’S PREY

The redoubtably prolific Cornwell, who has rounded out his revisionist Arthurian Warlord trilogy, filed four volumes in his Starbuck Civil War series, and now has 18 novels in his Richard Sharpe British Army series, plus other incidental novels about Stonehenge, etc., takes his hero Sharpe on the Expedition to Copenhagen of 1807. Sharpe, in the hip-hop fashion of Cornwell’s chronology, has already fought in the Waterloo Campaign in 1815 (Sharpe’s Waterloo), sailed to the New World in 1821 (Sharpe’s Devil) and most recently observed Nelson at Trafalgar (Sharpe’s Trafalgar, 2001) in 1805. Now, God’s teeth, how can it be, Sharpe not only is without woman but also without coin. Although he wants most to sell his battlefield commission for £450, he’s told battlefield commissions can’t be sold. Thus he must accept a post as quartermaster—and in addition is roped by the Honorable John Lavisser to carry a secret bribe to Denmark. But all is not well in Denmark, not with the French lusting to take over the Danish fleet. There is something splendid about Sharpe’s rugged leadership of British troops against the massed musketry of the Danes but not in the crippled children and widespread death of Danish civilians as the British bombard Copenhagen and set it afire.

Rousing. At last count, 12 Sharpe novels had been filmed by PBS.