Description: More than one hundred years after Columbus blundered onto Hispaniola, the West Indies are held in Spain's iron fist, and no threat to that absolute rule is tolerated. But such total control cannot last, not with the riches of an empire at stake, and French, English, and Dutch all struggle to pry open the Spanish grip. But one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers.
Camped on the shore of Hispaniola, these half-wild men eke out a living hunting the island's feral livestock. Among them, Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf--hulking, silent, deadly with musket and blade--lives out his exile, content that no one in the hunters' camp is at all curious about his past. But when a deadly hurricane sweeps through the Caribbean, it upends the buccaneers' rough existence. And it leaves in its wake opportunity as well, a chance for a new life for LeBoeuf and his fellow hunters. This stroke of luck, however, is not all it seems, and when even greater violence is visited upon them they find themselves locked in battle with some of the most powerful and ruthless men in the Spanish Empire.Brief description: Naval enthusiast James L. Nelson is the award-winning author of many works of fiction and nonfiction. His books include George Washington's Secret Navy, which won the Naval Order's prestigious Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and Glory in the Name, which was selected as the winner of the American Library Association's W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction. He has appeared on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and C-SPAN's Book TV. He lives in Maine with his family.