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"He turned just in time to see the ground erupt into a series of fountains sending earth scattering into the sky."
A bored and restless British aristocrat of the Victorian Era, William Darmon wished for another adventure with his wife, Elizabeth, but he did not know his thirst for thrills would land them in the thick of India's 1846 Sikh uprising. Elizabeth is kidnapped, and the unflagging Darmon braves the Himalayas and the foothills of the Urals to find his wife. Along the way, he must unlock a cipher or Great Britain's India will surely fall into the hands of Russia's land-grabbing Tsar.
This period thriller creates high drama from well-known historical highlights of Great Britain's struggle to control Mediterranean Sea routes and preserve the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against Russian expansionist tendencies. Like a piano's crescendo in a flickering silent melodrama, the action rises and falls in dramatic swells, with Darmon swashbuckling through a plot with more twists and turns than a Slinky. It's all good fun, especially for history buffs. The author's knowledge of this era's geopolitical climate, culture, and military terminology impresses.
Elizabeth and William Darmon evoke Nick and Nora in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man and Emerson and Amelia in Elizabeth Peters' Peabody novels. But sometimes action overwhelms character development. Moody and impulsive Elizabeth is an atypical Victorian daredevil, while William has an obsessive disorder that manifests in compulsive counting and calculating. The Darmons deserve to be unforgettably developed.
Readers of action-oriented and historical fiction will enjoy and learn from this fast-paced, well-researched voyage to England, India and Russia in the land-grabbing days of the mid-1800s.
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