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Summary
Summary
Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by dispatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attention of two privateers soon becomes menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination, as anything Patrick O'Brian has written.
Author Notes
Patrick O'Brian is the author of twenty volumes in the highly respected Aubrey/Maturin series of novels.
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Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
O'Brian's superb series on the early-19th-century adventures of Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy officer, and his friend Stephen Maturin, Navy surgeon and naturalist, continues with a look at the darker side of Maturin's life: his work in British intelligence. Aubrey, Maturin and Diana Villiers (Maturin's fickle and enigmatic love) are passengers on a packet ship from Nova Scotia to England when two American privateers give chase. They are hunting Maturin, who has compromised U.S. spy networks. The Americans are eluded, and upon reaching England, Maturin sets off to France. Armed with safe conduct papers, he lectures on natural history and installs Villiers in Paris. Suspicious French agents try to bait Maturin but he refuses to be lured into an indiscretion. On his return to London, Maturin is sent to woo Catalan officers and troops from the French cause to the British. Aubrey provides transport, but despite his best support, including staging a splendid charade chase on the water, the mission takes a nasty turn when their ship founders; seized by the French, Maturin and Aubrey are hauled off to Paris's infamous Temple Prison. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
The Surgeon's Mate , volume eight in Patrick O'Brian's marvelous collection of seafaring novels (e.g., The Ionian Mission , Audio Reviews, LJ 1/94), continues the saga of Jack Aubrey, a post captain in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars, and his particular friend Stephen Maturin, who is at once a ship's surgeon and a British intelligence agent. What makes this series outstanding is not only its exciting historical plot--set, in this outing, between the renewed war with America and the shifting loyalties of Spain--but the ongoing development of personalities and relationships among the principles: Jack; his wife, Sophie; Stephen; the femme fatale Diana Villiers; and a supporting cast of sailors, admirals, captains, naturalists, and enemy agents worthy of Charles Dickens. The friendship that develops between Jack and Stephen over the course of these novels can only be compared in its psychological complexity to the characters of Henry James. Reader Patrick Tull narrates The Surgeon's Mate capably. This entire series is recommended for libraries wishing to provide their patrons with a rare mix of excitement, historical accuracy, and literary depth.-- Sharon Cumberland, Graduate Ctr., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.