A desperate sea battle; a fortune risked on the turn of a card; a duel at dawn with the loser . . . Patrick O'Brian meets James Bond.The year is 1803, and the British Secret Service is contending with a belligerent France under Napoleon. The service suffers a blow in the loss of a prime agent, Thomas Grey, who—despondent at his wife's untimely death—resigns from British Intelligence and departs England for Boston, where he intends to become a lumber merchant. His plan to start a new life is thrown abruptly off course when a French intelligence network attempts to recruit him as an informer, and, in the process, exposes a grave new threat to Britain that Grey can't ignore. Confronting it seems likely to grant the grief-stricken widower a chance of extracting a personal revenge.A relentlessly paced and vividly imagined spy tale, Hold Fast will delight and entertain fans of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels, Bernard Cornwell's...

A secret treaty will determine whether England can survive against Napoleon, and Captain Grey races across the Atlantic to intercept a treasure fleet.Vienna—June 1804. At the glittering debut of Beethoven's Third Symphony, a Spanish diplomat meets with Captain Thomas Grey, agent of His Majesty's Secret Service. In exchange for a gigantic bribe, the Spaniard discloses Spain's darkest secret the actual terms of the Treaty of San Ildefonso with France.Spain's neutrality in Napoleon's war on Britain is only a ruse to keep the British navy from attacking the great treasure-armada now gathering in South America. Spanish warships will depart Montevideo, Uruguay, carrying 2,000 tons of gold; when the gold is safely in Madrid, Spain will declare war on Britain and ally with France to divide the British Empire between them. Britain's only hope is to sink or capture the treasure fleet, and the responsibility of delivering that blow falls to Grey. As...