It's 1868 and Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., arch-cad, amorist, cold-headed soldier, and reluctant hero, is back Fleeing a chain of vengeful pursuers that includes Mexican bandits, the French Foreign Legion, and the relatives of an infatuated Austrian beauty, Flashy is desperate for somewhere to take cover. So desperate, in fact, that he embarks on a perilous secret intelligence-gathering mission to help free a group of Britons being held captive by a tyrannical Abyssinian king. Along the way, of course, are nightmare castles, brigands, massacres, rebellions, orgies, and the loveliest and most...

George MacDonald Fraser was renowned for his legendary Flashman series featuring the incorrigible knave Harry Flashman, a soldier in the British army. After Fraser's death, his children discovered an unpublished first novel locked away in his study: Captain in Calico. In this lively stand-alone, Fraser introduces the real-life antihero Captain John Rackham. Called Calico Jack, he was the first to fly the skull and crossbones on a black flag, an illustrious eighteenth-century pirate who marauded the perilous Caribbean seas.
One tranquil evening in the Bahamas, Calico Jack, wanted on...