THE WINTER SOLDIERS

A Victorian military series crosses the Atlantic, picking up the adventures of a proto-commando hero in the middle of the Crimean War.

Alexander Kirk is the semi-aristocrat seeking adventure as a sergeant on special assignments in Her Majesty’s soon-to-be imperial army. Born on the wrong side of the sheets to a blustering, career-army Scottish baronet and his housemaid but raised in the manor by a loving stepmother, Kirk fights under the nom de guerre of Jack Crossman, “Fancy Jack” to his admirers. Keenly intelligent and well educated but with something of a chip on his shoulder, “Fancy Jack” has been shunted out of the mainstream of his regiment to head up a band of commandos doing the kind of intelligence-gathering the more gentlemanly general staffers wouldn’t dream of touching. American readers will need a bit of intelligence-gathering themselves as they’re dropped into the middle of Jack’s career, picking up his story as the French and English lay siege to the Russians in Sebastopol. The Russians may be the enemy, but the aristocratic idiots at the top of the British command, particularly Lord Raglan, seem to be doing the most damage to an army that’s underfed and underdressed in an icy Black Sea winter. In a series of actions, Jack and his almost politically correct band of warriors (a loyal Turk, an American, a woman disguised as a man, etc.) seek out and partially destroy a band of marauding deserters, spy on a corrupt general, destroy a German anti-siege machine, and clean up the half of the marauding deserter band that got away. In the process, Jack is charged with the education of a by-the-book lieutenant and, in a truly odd sidebar, with the education of a classroom full of military brats. There’s occasional time for dalliance with some pretty ladies, including a now-married past love and an equally attractive “cousin.”

Not as cerebral as Patrick O’Brian, but full of interesting war bits. And “Fancy Jack” is an attractive hero.