Birds Of Prey (The Courtneys)

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He led prayers twice a day and exhorted his seamen to gentle and dignified behaviour when they put into port – although Hal knew that this advice was seldom followed.

It is 1884, and in the Sudan, decades of brutal misgovernment by the ruling Egyptian Khedive in Cairo precipitates a bloody rebellion and Holy War. Seriously, every time Smith (literally) had her thighs getting all slippery when she thought about dudes getting hung or tortured I had to shake my head in bewildered wonderment. Under his father’s tutelage he had studied it so that he knew the colour, the taste and run of it, each eddy and surge. What hope was there that the excluded Christian nations, in their envy and resentment, would honour this declaration? Wilbur Smith excels in this kind of storytelling and, most important, in creating likable characters and detestable villains.

We follow our hero Henry “Hal” Courtney as he assists his father Francis on his quest to capture a Dutch East India ship laden with spoils somewhere near the coast of Africa.

He made out the others’ sails then exactly where they should be, tiny pale flecks against the dark sea.You’d think that Wilbur Smith, himself, sailed the high seas in the 17th Century, such is his brilliant depiction of those days. Publishers Weekly Wilbur Smith carries all the powerful drama and rich emotions of a bygone time into his action packed tale of the sea. Like I mentioned earlier, it’d be hard to find a hist fic box that Smith doesn’t check over the course of the 700 or so pages. The land of gold and ivory and slaves and other treasures, all waiting for a man bold enough to seek them out, and, perhaps, to perish in the endeavour. I am new to the genre of what my librarian termed "men's fiction," or "men's historical fiction" and I am unfamiliar as to whether these conventions are exclusive to Smith or the genre as a whole, but as a reader I feel that there is only so many "dark berry nipples" that a 550 pages book can contain.