Rebellion

December 15, 2013
McGee (Rapscallion, 2013, etc.) continues the Regency-era adventures of Matthew Hawkwood of the Bow Street Runners, the crown's special police unit. Wellington's Peninsula Campaign continues, and there, McGee rips the tale open with a nail-biting chase and narrow escape. Who-why-wherefore is a surprise to be unwrapped later. It's London next. There are characters familiar--Jago, Hawkwood's former sergeant, now profiting in the shadows at the edge of the law; phlegmatic James Read, Bow Street chief; and Twigg, Read's Dickensian clerk. And characters new--like Chen, exiled Chinese monk tutoring Hawkwood in martial arts. At Bow Street, Read tells Hawkwood he's temporarily assigned to the Home Office, and there, he'll receive orders to spy in France. Hawkwood endures a colossal Channel storm before being tossed up on a beach and greeted by a French patrol. Another escape. In Paris, he meets Capt. Colquhoun Grant, thought dead after French imprisonment. With Napoleon 2,000 miles away in Russia, Hawkwood's astonished to learn he's key in a conspiracy to overthrow the Little Corporal. After all, the empire is merely "one man's delusion of grandeur...no more solid than a grass house built on sand." With drunken generals, betrayals and revenge to be sought, McGee drops French eminences into the plot, with a sufficient number of generals, colonels and bureaucrats peopling the narrative's second half to require a score card. Villains abound--including Vidocq, former convict and first chief of the dreaded Brigade de Surete. Most entertainingly, the talented McGee scatters literary nuggets and factoids about places and people--for example, Vidocq, Grant and other characters are drawn from history. McGee is also a knowledgeable tour guide of 1812 Paris. With a supporting cast from Jacobite emigre Jamie McPherson to general's wife Denise Malet to Lt. Stuart, captaining the cutter Griffin across the stormy Channel only to be captured and tortured, Hawkwood proves a worthy hero for this epic tale. Hawkwood fans will delight. New readers should seek out the full series.

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Starred review from November 4, 2013
Given that readers know that Napoleon was not ousted in a coup in 1812 while leading his Russian campaign, it’s a tribute to McGee’s storytelling skills that his fourth thriller featuring a Regency-era James Bond (after 2013’s Rapscallion) is as entertaining as it is. Matthew Hawkwood, a Bow Street Runner, has been assigned an impossible mission, complete with plausible deniability on the part of his superior in the Alien Office, who’s responsible for rooting out troublemakers among the refugees from the Terror in postrevolutionary France. Posing as a French officer, Hawkwood is to cross the Channel, meet with an unnamed source, and assess the feasibility of the man’s proposal to the British government. Hawkwood ultimately learns that the plan is to overthrow Bonaparte himself. The nonstop action doesn’t come at the price of either plausibility or historical accuracy. Agent: Jennifer Weitz, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.