James L. Nelson

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, and one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers....

Fed up with an outlaw existence, Calico Jack Rackam swears off the pirate life, but he hasn’t reckoned with Anne Bonny, a woman who would as soon stab a man as give him a good tumble—that is, unless he’s a pirate. Soon Jack finds himself out on the high seas again....

Acclaimed, award-winning author James L. Nelson—praised as “a master of both his period and the English language” by Patrick O’Brian—returns to the world of sea and sail in The French Prize....

With their longships storm-blown to the southern coast of Engla-land, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his men find themselves rich with plunder and safely ensconced in a priory called Christchurch. But that cannot last. Thorgrim, in a wolf dream, has seen the enemy armies closing in....

Summer comes to Ireland, and an uneasy peace holds at Loch Garman. The Northmen, eager to get to sea, work relentlessly on their ships, with the aid of their unlikely allies, the Irish, who are just as eager to see them go. But not everyone is willing to just let them sail away....

Spring has come to Ireland, where Thorgrim Night Wolf, new-made Lord of Vík-ló, and the 300 Viking warriors under his command have suffered through a brutal winter....

Driven ashore on the coast of Ireland, their longships nearly wrecked by the gods who seem unwilling to let them leave, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his band of Northmen once again face a fight for their survival....

With their ill-fated raid on the monastary at Glendalough torn apart by betrayal and defeat, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his handful of survivors from the crew of Sea Hammer....

After the treachery and slaughter they met during the raid on Glendalough, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his small band of surviving Northmen have returned to Vik-lo....

For centuries the Vikings have swept out of the Norse countries and fallen on whatever lands they could reach aboard their longships, and few could resist the power of their violent onslaught....

Eager to return to his native Norway, Thorgrim agrees to participate in one last raid under the command of a man he does not trust....

Having recovered from the wounds of battle and having won for himself a fortune, a crew, and a longship, Thorgrim Night Wolf makes ready to leave for Norway....

Thorgrim Night Wolf, now somewhere on the south coast of Engla-land, may be closer to his goal of returning home than he has been since reaching Ireland years before, but he is still very, very far away....

Thorgrim Night Wolf and his men, hunkered down behind their ad hoc defenses and facing off against the powerful army of Æthelwulf, king of Wessex, must find some means to continue their voyage home. But Æthelwulf, too, is trapped, unable to set sail on his pilgrimage to Rome....

With the Spanish Empire brutally driving the buccaneers from their hunting grounds, the half-wild men must look for a new refuge in the West Indies. They find it just a few miles off the northwest coast of Hispaniola: the island of Tortuga.