The Dawlish Chronicles

In 1877, the Russo-Turkish War is reaching its climax. A Russian victory will pose a threat for Britain's strategic interests.

To protect those interests, an ambitious British naval officer, Nicholas Dawlish, is assigned to the Ottoman Navy to ravage Russian supply lines in the Black Sea. In the depths of a savage winter, as Turkish forces face defeat on all fronts, Dawlish confronts enemy ironclads, Cossack lances, and merciless Kurdish irregulars and finds himself a pawn in the rivalry of the Sultan's half brothers for control of the collapsing empire.

And in the midst of this chaos, unwillingly and unexpectedly, Dawlish finds himself drawn to a woman whom he believes he should not love. Not for his own sake, and not for hers....

Britannia's Wolf introduces a naval hero who is more familiar with steam, breechloaders, and torpedoes than with sails, carronades, and broadsides. As a boy Dawlish joined a Royal Navy still commanded by veterans of Trafalgar, but he will help forge the Dreadnought navy of Jutland and the Great War. Further books will accompany Dawlish on that voyage into the future....

The Dawlish Chronicles series, which commences with Britannia's Wolf, is in the great tradition of the Napoleonic-era naval fiction of Forester, Kent, O'Brian, and Pope but is set in the late 19th century, as Britain's empire approached its apogee. In this period old enemies were still threats, new players were joining the ranks of the Great Powers, and the potential for local conflict to escalate into general war - even world war - was never absent. Britain's ability to project force rapidly and decisively on a global scale was assured by a Royal Navy that was in transition as new technologies emerged at an unprecedented rate. But force alone was often inappropriate, and conflicts often had to be resolved by guile and by proxy. It is in this world of change and uncertainty that Nicholas Dawlish, always resourceful, sometimes ruthless, occasionally self-doubting, must contend for the advancement and happiness he hungers for.