Britannia's Amazon

1882: Florence Dawlish stands at the quayside in Portsmouth and watches the Royal Navy's newest cruiser, HMS Leonidas, departing under command of her husband Captain Nicholas Dawlish. Months of separation lie ahead, quiet months which she plans to fill with charitable works. Witnessing of the abduction of a young girl shatters that quiet, bringing Florence into brutal contact with the squalid underside of complacent Victorian society. With her personal loyalties challenged to the limit, and conscious that her persistence in seeking justice may damage her ambitious husband's career, not to mention the possibility of prison for herself, Florence is drawn ever deeper into a maelstrom of corruption and violence. The enemies she faces are merciless and vicious, their identities protected by guile, power and influence. Florence has faced danger before but it was shared then with her husband Nicholas. Now she must make the hardest decisions of her life without his support. And when legal measures prove futile she must make very difficult choices... Britannia's Amazon plays out in a world of extreme wealth and limitless poverty, marriages of American heiresses to British aristocracy and children starving in foul garrets, crusading journalists and hideously disfigured match-girls, arrogant aesthetes and ineffectual benevolence. This is the fifth volume of the Dawlish Chronicles naval fiction series - action and adventure set in the age of transition from sail to steam in the later 19th Century. But in Britannia's Amazon the action is driven by Florence, the indomitable wife whom naval officer Nicholas Dawlish met - and fell in love with - in the first of the series, Britannia's Wolf. Fiercely devoted to the welfare of seamen and their families, she is to find that Britain itself offers dangers as lethal as her husband faces overseas. This volume includes, as a bonus, the short story Britannia's Eye, which casts light on Nicholas's boyhood and his decision to join the Royal Navy. "Clever, intense plotting, a heroine with a steel backbone, and Victorian London exposed at its noblest and most depraved" - Alison Morton, author of the Roma Nova series"I've enjoyed sea adventure tales since I was introduced to C. S. Forester's Hornblower books when I was a boy," says author Antoine Vanner, "and I've never tired since of stories of action and adventure by land and by sea. The Napoleonic era has however come to dominate the war and military genre but the century that followed it was one no less exciting, an added attraction being the arrival and adoption of so much new technology. I've reflected this in the Dawlish Chronicles and for this reason I'm pleased that nautical author Joan Druett has described me as 'The Tom Clancy of historical naval fiction.' The novels have as their settings actual events of the international power-games of the period and real-life personalities usually play significant roles.""I've also always admired social-realist authors of the Late Victorian and Edwardian periods - Zola, Gissing and Bennett especially," Vanner says. "Reading them again recently prompted me to break new ground in Britannia's Amazon. I wanted to link the Royal Navy of the late 19th Century to the society its crews left behind when they sailed overseas. It was a society in seething transition, with technical innovations impacting ever more strongly on people's lives, but one also of vast resentment, abuse, unrest and limited reform. Differences in wealth were extreme, abject poverty was widespread, and financial and sexual exploitation were rife. The weak were almost powerless and it is for them that Florence - herself Britannia's Amazon - fights her lonely battle."