Sergeant Richard Sharpe, the only survivor after a bloody attack at the hands of a mercenary army in the Mahratta Confederation, vows to avenge the deaths of his friends.

Richard Sharpe, fresh from his heroic adventures in India, faces a new enemy when the ship carrying him home is attacked by a fearsome French warship. With the help of a captain in the Royal Navy, Sharpe learns the French ship carries a treaty that could ignite renewed hostilities against the British in India. Now a fateful rendezvous is waiting in the waters off Cadiz.

At the height of the 1810 battle of Bussaco, Captain Richard Sharpe finds himself separated from his company and lured into a trap from which he must escape in order to rejoin the conflict and stop French invaders at Lisbon.

From New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, the twelth installment in the world-renowned Sharpe series, chronicling the rise of Richard Sharpe, a Private in His Majesty's Army at the siege of Seringapatam. Quartered in a crumbling Portuguese fort, Richard Sharpe and his men are attacked by an elite French unit, led by an old enemy of Sharpe's, and suffer heavy losses. The army's high command blame Sharpe for the disaster and his military...

Lured back to the army from a rural idyll, Sharpe's career culminates in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

"Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe is a man with a reputation. Born in the gutter, raised a foundling, he joined the army twenty-one years ago, and it's been his home ever since. He's a loose cannon, but his unconventional methods make him a valuable weapon. So when, the dust still settling after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington needs a favour, he turns to Sharpe. For Wellington knows that the end of one war is only the beginning of another....