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The surprising thing about SHARPE'S HAVOC has nothing to do with its content. The content of the Richard Sharpe books --- this is the nineteenth --- is generally the same. There is a mission, a woman and an enemy for Richard Sharpe --- and usually a lot of hard fighting along the way. SHARPE'S HAVOC is no different, which is not surprising. There is a mission; Lieutenant Richard Sharpe must keep his rag-tag band of Riflemen safe as they rejoin Lord Wellington's army fighting the French in Portugal in 1809. There is a woman; Kate Savage, the beautiful young daughter of an English wine merchant, who Sharpe must protect from the ravages of war. And there is an enemy; one Colonel Christopher of the Foreign Office, who is busy sneaking around behind enemy lines, trying to arrange for the surrender of British troops to the perfidious French and makes the mistake of stealing Richard Sharpe's telescope.
But it is the setting that is surprising. The first twelve Richard Sharpe books were all set during the Napoleonic conflict, taking Sharpe from an anonymous quartermaster in northern Spain to a battalion commander at Waterloo. The next volume, SHARPE'S DEVIL, moved the action to Chile (which is where Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series also winds up). After that, Cornwell authored three books about Sharpe's early career in India and the two most recent books dealt primarily with naval battles, of all things.
SHARPE'S HAVOC takes us back to the Peninsular Campaign, filling in a gap between the first and second of the Sharpe books. It takes place in Portugal, right at the time that Sir Arthur Wellesley (later Lord Wellington) takes over His Majesty's army on the Peninsula and uses it to beat the living daylights out of the French. The French invasion of Portugal has shattered British morale and left Sharpe the leader of a small platoon of green-jacketed regulars separated from the rest of the army. With the help of stalwart sergeant Patrick Harper and an alliance with an idealistic Portuguese lawyer-turned-soldier, Sharpe must protect the girl, defeat the enemy and complete the mission, just as he has done so many times before.
The challenge for Bernard Cornwell here is to return to the scene of his greatest triumph and produce another book about the Peninsular Campaign to stand with his earlier works (that, and to keep his fingers from falling off from typing too much; there's a second book in his new series about the Holy Grail coming out this year as well). It's a challenge that he more than meets. Even though the characters, setting and plot are familiar, Cornwell manages to put them into new and tense situations. Sharpe and Harper witness a horrific bridge collapse, defend a remote mountaintop fort and lead the way for a daring British invasion of a Portuguese seminary. The action scenes crackle with intensity and excitement. There's even a heroic French officer leading the charge against Sharpe --- Cornwell describes him as "Sharpe-like", a high compliment indeed --- who emerges as a brave opponent, for once.
Where SHARPE'S HAVOC falls short, compared to its predecessors, is in its other two elements. The villain, Colonel Christopher, is a weak, backstabbing little man, no real match for Sharpe. And the woman, Kate Savage, is a little slip of a girl, caught up in Christopher's cowardly embrace but saved by her sense of patriotism and duty.
But all of this is subordinated to the pleasure that fans of the series will take in seeing Sharpe and Harper together again, marching against the French and fighting against terrible odds. And for people who aren't yet fans of Richard Sharpe, SHARPE'S HAVOC is as good a place as any to introduce yourself to a scarred English Rifleman and his band of thieves, poachers and outcasts. Because SHARPE'S HAVOC is a good read --- and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds (curtis@txreviews.com), who writes movie reviews at http://www.txreviews.com/.
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