BACK TO BATTLE

Still bloody, still rousing, the British naval adventures of Ginger Maguire (The Lion at Sea, The Dangerous Years) come to a ringing close in this final volume of the trilogy. We've followed Maguire from World War I and Scapa Flow through the peacetime years when he managed to collect medals for heavy action abroad--and now be eases into World War II, after some run-ins off the Spanish coast during the Civil War. As for WW II action itself, Ginger engages in every major British naval encounter from war's beginning to end. First he's doing convoy duty in the North Atlantic, then he's off to Dunkirk and the evacuation, then up to Narvik and the battle of Norway. Meanwhile he's getting over the death of his most recent mistress, a Spanish countess executed by a Republican firing squad, and making the most of having lost his wife (by divorce) to his old enemy, the cynically gifted Verschoyle--who now oddly becomes Ginger's closest friend. And he's also shepherding his stepson through his first steps in the military and in marriage, plus: a brief reunion with Charley (Charlotte), his first and greatest and most tragic love. Beefed up by unusually three-dimensional players (many of whom die under bomb and shell, in battle and back home), this is naval-action fiction at its most seaworthy--steel decks bursting like tinfoil, great sea-behemoths in flame, and canny tactics under fire.