Britannia's Amazon (Paperback) | Released: 20 Oct 2016

This is the seventh volume of the Dawlish Chronicles naval fiction series - action and adventure set in the age of transition from sail to steam in the late 19th Century. It runs in parallel time with the sixth volume, Britannia's Spartan. But in Britannia's Amazon, the action is driven by Florence, the indomitable wife whom naval officer Nicholas Dawlish met - and fell in love within the third of the series, Britannia's Wolf

It's 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 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, as well as prison for herself, Florence is drawn ever deeper into a maelstrom of corruption and violence.

The enemies Florences faces are merciless and vicious, their identities protected by guile, power and influence. She 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, ineffectual benevolence - and espionage.

Britannia's Amazon brings all these elements together - it's simultaneously a story of mystery and suspense and a thriller that is also in the classic tradition, 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.

Why the Dawsh Chronicles series?

"I've enjoyed sea adventure tales since I was introduced as a boy to C.S. Forester's Hornblower books," says author Antoine Vanner, "and I've never tired since of stories of 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. Vast societal changes were also afoot, and by the Late Victorian period Britain had established herself as the dominant world power. I wanted therefore to write naval and thriller fiction set in that time - hence the Dawlish Chronicles series.

" "I've also always been a fan of historical detective fiction, especially when set in Victorian times," Vanner adds. "It's notable that it was in this period that the Mystery, Thriller and Suspense genres emerged - with authors such as Wilkie Collins, and later Arthur Conan-Doyle, winning immense popularity. I've also admired social-realist authors of the Late Victorian and Edwardian periods - Zola, Gissing and Bennett especially. Reading them again 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 major technical innovations 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."