Dewey Lambdin Books in Order

When his ship Vigilance is recalled for refit, Lewrie suddenly finds himself beached on half-pay, settling into London life with his wife Jessica and grown children. A chance brush with a dognapping ring and stolen masterpieces thrusts him back into the headlines, where public praise and private enemies quickly turn “much ado” into fresh trouble.

Commanding a motley flotilla of troopships and barges off Calabria, Lewrie tests a new way of harrying Napoleon’s armies—swift coastal raids supplied by Sicilian fixers and scruffy local partisans. Success at sea attracts jealous superiors, leaving him fighting French forces while watching for betrayal from his own side.

After smashing four French frigates off northern Spain, Lewrie expects promotion; instead jealous enemies leave him without ship or commission. Months ashore in London bring a fragile new happiness and the prospect of remarriage, until the Admiralty drags him back to lead risky coastal raids with untested army troops and borrowed transports.

After hauling the shattered remains of Sir John Moore’s army out of Corunna and surviving a lightning strike that nearly cripples Sapphire, Lewrie is sure his sea career is over. Instead he is made commodore of a small squadron sent to prey on French supply ships along Spain’s deadly “Coast of Death,” where reefs, storms, and enemy guns all vie to sink him.

Stranded in Gibraltar while Sapphire sits hog-tied in harbor, Lewrie is reduced to commanding harbor gunboats—until Napoleon marches into Portugal and Spain. Suddenly he’s ferrying arms to Spanish patriots, scouting enemy fortresses at close range, and escorting British troops into some of the first clashes of the Peninsular War.

Recovering from serious wounds at his father’s estate, Lewrie chafes at idleness until the Admiralty hands him a plodding 50-gun ship, HMS Sapphire, instead of the frigate he wants. Sent to Gibraltar and quietly seconded to the Foreign Office, he must scrape together soldiers, boats, and support to wage hit-and-run coastal war along Spanish shores.

By 1805 Lewrie is chasing privateers in the Bahamas when rumors of a huge French fleet and invasion plans send panic through Nassau. After a desperate defense he is swept into seizing the Cape of Good Hope and on to risky attacks on South American ports, where one brutal sea fight could end his career.

Dragged from a warm English bed and sent to the stormy Bahamas, Lewrie hoists his first broad pendant and styles himself commodore of a scratch squadron. Ordered to hunt French and Spanish privateers off Cuba and Florida—and probe neutral American harbors for covert help—he blunders through diplomacy in his own irreverent way.

Moored in Nassau after a pirate hunt, Captain Lewrie is growing bored when one of his sloops limps in carrying survivors from an American brig taken by a Spanish privateer near Crooked Island Passage. Chasing the raider promises prize money and excitement, but the rescued crew’s story hides a far more drunken, tangled truth.

With the Peace of Amiens shattered, Lewrie and his frigate hover off Haiti as France’s defeated garrison tries to escape a furious slave rebellion. Back in England he is honored for past exploits, then quietly ordered to help test an experimental “torpedo” against the looming threat of invasion.

Peace with France briefly strands Lewrie on half-pay, trying to make farming and marriage work in Surrey. An ill-fated trip to Paris brings him face to face with Bonaparte’s new order and old French enemies, and when war inevitably resumes he returns to sea with more than national honor driving him.

Cleared—barely—of slave-stealing charges, Lewrie finds himself marooned on half-pay and getting into trouble ashore. The Admiralty drags him back to sea in the frigate Thermopylae, sending him into the ice-choked Baltic to scout hostile fleets, wrangle prickly Russian envoys, and fight through the Battle of Copenhagen.

Back in England with a new frigate, HMS Savage, and newspapers hailing him as a hero, Lewrie might finally enjoy his fame. Instead he learns a Jamaican court has condemned him for slave-stealing, forcing him to fight for his career while dodging enemies who would rather see him hanged than back at sea.

Two years after spiriting a dozen enslaved people off a Jamaican plantation, Lewrie finds that slave-stealing is a hanging offense and the owners want his neck. Sent to escort an East India Company convoy to the Cape and India—alongside a traveling circus and lethal archer Eudoxia Durschenko—he must juggle legal peril, French raiders, and temptation.

In pre-Revolutionary Wilmington, North Carolina, popular politician Harry Tresmayne is found murdered beside a lonely Cape Fear road. His friend Matthew Livesey probes the crime and discovers that Harry’s public virtues hid private entanglements that could destroy some of the region’s highest and lowest families—including his own.

A rich French prize and six of his own men vanish from a Caribbean anchorage, sending Captain Lewrie on a chase from Hispaniola to Barbados and the remote Dry Tortugas. The search leads to a sadistic pirate ring, a suspected traitor, and a covert journey up the Mississippi into Spanish New Orleans.

In 1798 the Caribbean is boiling with privateers, secret agents, and old grudges. Lewrie must honor a deadly duel, serve as an unwilling cat’s-paw for diplomats, confront his arch-enemy Choundas, and reckon with the newly reborn United States Navy.

Lewrie’s new orders carry him to the brutal slave uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where Britain’s intervention is coming apart. Amid fever-ridden camps, shifting alliances, and a charismatic rebel leader, he must steer between moral outrage, military necessity, and his own survival.

After daring maneuvers at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent win him a shining new frigate, Proteus, Lewrie barely has time to enjoy command before mutiny tears the fleet apart. Facing rebellious crews, political suspicion, and the return of an old enemy, he must fight for both ship and reputation.

Napoleon’s armies are overrunning Italy, and Lewrie’s Jester is sent into the Adriatic with a tiny squadron to harass French supply lines. Outnumbered and far from help, he strikes an uneasy alliance with rough-edged Serbian pirates, betting that shared enemies will be enough to hold them.

Promoted to command the sloop Jester, Lewrie stalks French shipping in the Mediterranean while secretly ordered to draw his mutilated nemesis, spymaster Guillaume Choundas, into a final duel. With Horatio Nelson as squadron leader and a dangerous French courtesan nearby, he must balance duty, revenge, and desire.

Chafing at life as a country gentleman, Lewrie jumps at the chance to rejoin the fleet just as war with Revolutionary France erupts. Aboard HMS Cockerel he battles a tyrannical captain, falls under the spell of Lady Emma Hamilton, and fights in the desperate defense of Toulon.

Given his own command at last, Lewrie takes the fast gun ketch Alacrity to the Bahamas to stamp out piracy. Between genteel Nassau salons and hurricane-lashed channels, he chases a cunning corsair and crosses a powerful island family who would rather see him ruined than victorious.

Peace has left Lewrie restless in pleasure-soaked London—until he’s sent undercover aboard the merchantman Telesto to hunt raiders preying on East India Company ships. Between Calcutta and Canton, he clashes with a ruthless French captain, Mindanao pirates, and his own scoundrel father.

After passing his lieutenant’s exam, Lewrie becomes first officer of the small brig Shrike. From delicate diplomacy with Muskogee and Seminole leaders to hard fighting beside a young Horatio Nelson, he learns how much danger and freedom come with the king’s commission.

Serving on HMS Desperate off the rebellious American coast, midshipman Alan Lewrie is thrown into the Battle of the Capes and the siege of Yorktown. Among embittered neighbors and suspicious officers, he must prove his courage on both sea and shore.

Seventeen-year-old rake Alan Lewrie is hustled out of Georgian London and into His Majesty’s Navy after a carefully arranged family scandal. Aboard the frigate Ariadne he stumbles through brutal training and colonial battles, discovering an unexpected talent for war at sea.