Wherein, the Viscount of Marsdale, duelist, libertine, dilettante, and haphazard philanthropist, travels to the colony of Jamaica to establish a sugar plantation for his estranged father.
Once There, he finds he has much in common with the buccaneers of Port Royal. Thus he joins them and learns of the strange traditions, tactics, and customs of the Brethren of the Coast.
Falling in Love, he partners with Gaston, the mysterious French madman known as The Ghoul, and discovers another as noble, disenfranchised, and scarred as himself.
Together, they explore an end to loneliness, and seek to exorcise the demons of their pasts, in a wilderness torn by war and ambition.
ISBN13 - 978-0-9721098-2-6
LCCN - 2006920249
544 pages - 6x9 - $19.95
June 20, 2006
The book is so eventful—exciting, sexy, philosophical, funny, dramatic, and well-characterized—that the Historical Novel–ese it’s told in generally fades from view. The increasing emotional attachment and sexual tension between Will and Gaston is especially finely paced, escalating at calculated yet highly natural-feeling intervals that allow Hoffman to reveal his characters’ back-story in perfect-sized bites. Unfortunately (and magnificently), the trilogy itself is equally deliberately paced over all three books—now I’m impatient for volumes two and three. —Jeff Matthews
July 14, 2006
The book not only looks at the complex nature of the all-male world of the pirates of the Caribbean, but it also is one hell of an adventure novel. The rather formal tone to the language gets the book off to a slow start, but by the time Will has returned to England the story picks up speed and once he lands in Jamaica the book has become a real page-turner. Every page is rich in historical fact and details, which occasionally bog the story down, but is none the less fascinating. This rich tapestry of historical background provides the context needed to contrast the times with the story of this young gay man and his world of often-misrepresented privateers and buccaneers. Hoffman’s research is put to good use as she imparts a visceral sense of what the world was like in 1666, capturing how intriguing the New World of the Americas was to the people of Europe still mired in the waning years of the Reformation and decedent monarchies. It is also fascinating to picture an all-male society with straight men and gay men in which one’s sexuality is not that clearly defined. And, for many of the men that Will meets, choosing to live the life of a pirate is a political decision motivated by their wish to live their lives as far away from women as possible. Kind of a gay male version on the whole radical lesbian separatists movement of the 1980s. - Howie Green