Rating: 
Summary: Hoo boy - hope you like blood
Review: Sharpe is once again in the wrong place at the right time - this time Trafalgar. The battle scenes are riveting and horrendous - it is utterly amazing what these sea warriors lived through. Sharpe is his usual indestructible self, which strains imagination after awhile. I was disturbed by Sharpe's willingness to cold bloodedly murder a pathetic antagonist who tries to blackmail him. It took some of the sheen off his heroic character, and doesn't ring true. Still a great read if you're into this genre.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Review: The 17th Richard Sharpe book finds author Cornwell touched with a bit of "Flashman" syndrome�that is, the desire to place a swashbuckling title character on the scene of every major event of their lifetime, meeting all manner of historical personages. In George McDonald Fraser's Flashman series, this is acceptable, as the whole enterprise is comedic. However, the Sharpe series is a much more serious and realistic effort at historical fiction, and it detracts from it to have Sharpe shoehorned into the defining naval engagement in the history of the British empire. That said, the book is still fairly entertaining stuff sure to please any fan of the series.The gist of it is that Sharpe is making his way from service in India to join the 95th Rifles, the green-jacketed regiment that is his home for most of the series. Loaded down with jewels looted from the Sultan Tipoo, he books passage on an East India Company ship. There's the usual cast of characters here, a bluff Englishman or two who like Sharpe, a Lord who very much doesn't, a pretty young woman to fall in love with, and a few people who aren't what they seem. Intertwined with various shipboard skulking and skullduggery is a plot involving a French raider. This eventually leads to Sharpe's transfer to British naval ship. a lengthy cat and mouse game with the raider, and ultimately a meeting with the legendary Admiral Nelson and finally the great battle. The shipboard fighting is all extremely well described, and one gets a full sense of the terror and horror of naval warfare of the era. Similarly the shipboard deceit and treachery is ingenious and nasty. Less interesting is the love affair of Sharpe's, and given the intensity and outcome, it doesn't dovetail with the earlier written, though chronologically later Sharpe books. All in all, it's wonderful to have another Sharpe book, but one wonders how the series can continue without Cornwell having to shoehorn him into more and more unlikely venues.
Rating: 
Summary: Contrived but magnificent
Review: Yes, Cornwell has to jump through some literary and historical accuracy hoops to get Sharpe -- confirmed landlubber extrordinaire -- to Trafalgar, but, here, it just plain works. After a few preliminaries, Cornwell uses the heart of the book to tell the story of Trafalgar through the eyes of the redoubtable Ensign Sharpe. Yes, Sharpe gets more tail than your average movie star . . . and, yes, some traditional British cliches are present -- the nasty sneering aristocrat, and so forth, but Cornwell's sheer story-telling ability makes it one of the finest (along with Waterloo) Sharpe novels yet. The final hundred pages, even though the feature ships are fictional, tell the story of the great naval battle in more readable style -- while getting all the important details correct -- than any non-fiction book I've yet encountered. As the afterword teases, our hero must march again. If I can kick in my two cents, I'd suggest sending an aging Col. Sharpe to help the Greeks win their independence from the infidel Turks. All in all, a great read.
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