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At a time of shortages and sudden death, even a lieutenant can find himself faced with tasks and decisions more suitably given to officers of greater experience. And, as the Trojan, an eighty-gun ship of the line, goes about her affairs, the threat to Bolitho and his companions makes itself felt from New York to the Caribbean.

This fourteenth Bolitho novel has the epic scenes of action, the powerful characterization and the authentic period detail that have made Alexander Kent a bestseller wherever sea stories are read. After eight years of war between Britain and France there is at last a rumour of peace.

March, 1811After two and a half months of precious peace in Cornwall with his beloved mistress Catherine, Admiral Richard Bolitho is once again summoned to London.

March 1814Admiral Sir Richard Bolitho returns to England from several months' rigorous patrolling off the North American coast.

As captain of His Majesty's frigate Unrivalled of forty-six guns, Adam Bolitho is required to assist the senior officer of the patrolling squadron. But all efforts of the patrols to curb a flourishing trade in human life are hampered by unsuitable ships, and by the belligerence of the Dey of Algiers, which threatens to ignite a full-scale war.

February 1813With convoys from Canada and the Caribbean falling victim to American privateers, Sir Richard Bolitho returns to Halifax to pursue a war he knows will not be won, but which neither Britain nor the United States can afford to lose. England's youngest admiral desires only peace.

FEBRUARY 1806The frigate carrying Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Bolitho drops anchor off the shores of southern Africa.

June 1793, Gibraltar - The gathering might of revolutionary France prepares to engulf Europe in another bloody war. For Richard Bolitho, the renewal of hostilities means a fresh command and the chance of action after long months of inactivity. Bolitho and the crew of the Hyperion are trapped by the French near a dry Mediterranean island.

For the young Richard Bolitho the spring of 1778 marked a complete transformation for himself and his future. It was the year in which the American War of Independence changed to an all-out struggle for freedom from British rule - and the year when Bolitho took command of the Sparrow, a small, fast and well-armed sloop of war.

The year is 1774 and Bolitho is the third lieutenant joining the 28-gun frigate Destiny at Plymouth. Despatched on a secret mission far south to Rio and then to the Caribbean, Destiny and her company face the hazards of conspiracy, treason and piracy - and, as the little ship sails on, Bolitho has to learn amid broadside battles at sea.

As 1794 draws to a close Richard Bolitho, commanding the old seventy-four-gun ship of the line Hyperion, leaves Plymouth to join a squadron blockading the rising power of Revolutionary France.

But peace will present its own challenge to Adam Bolitho, captain of His Majesty's Ship Unrivalled, as many of his contemporaries face the prospect of discharge. The life of a frigate captain is always lonely, but for Adam, mourning the death of his uncle Admiral Sir Richard Bolitho, that solitude acquires a deeper poignancy.

OCTOBER 1789, NEW SOUTH WALESInto Sydney, capital of Britain's infant colony, sails the frigate Tempest.

In March 1784, at a time when most of the fleet was laid up, His Majesty's frigate Undine weighed anchor at Spithead to begin a voyage to India and far beyond. As her new captain, Richard Bolitho was glad to go, despite the nature of his orders and the immensity of the voyage - for he was leaving an England suffering from the aftermath of war.

He has written dozens of naval books under his own name and the pseudonym Alexander Kent, including the famous Richard Bolitho books set during the Napoleonic Wars.

Colours Aloft!, the sixteenth Richard Bolitho novel, bears all the hallmarks of its best-selling predecessors. September 1803Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Bolitho finds himself the new master of the Argonaute, a French flagship taken in battle.

As the clouds of war begin to rise once more over the Channel, he has no choice but to accept an appointment to the Nore. With his small flotilla of three topsail cutters Bolitho sets out to search the coast for seamen who have fled the harsh discipline of His Majesty's Navy for the more tempting rewards of smuggling.

In March 1808, as Napoleon holds Portugal and threatens his old ally Spain, Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Bolitho is dispatched once more to the Cape of Good Hope to establish a permanent naval force there. Setting aside his bitter memories and the anguish of a friendship betrayed, Bolitho takes passage in the ill-fated Golden Plover.

Returning safely to England after the dramatic capture of Martinque, Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Bolitho finds an all too brief respite from war and politics in the arms of his mistress Catherine Somervell. Although ordered immediately to the Indian Ocean, for the first time Bolitho's thoughts are not of glory but his own - and the Navy's - past.

The twelfth Richard Bolitho story that chronologically follows the events covered by "Signal - Close Action!" In September 1800, Richard Bolitho assumes command of his own squadron, but he soon realizes that his experience, gained in the line of battle, has ill-prepared him for the manoeuvring of power politics.

When in 1798, Richard Bolitho hoists his pendant as commodore of a squadron, and prepares to re-enter the Mediterranean, he is soon made aware of his responsibility. There are rumours of a massive French armada and of the latest type of artillery, and Bolitho's orders are to seek out the enemy, and to discover the intentions of his growing force.

In the spring of 1797, Richard Bolitho brings the 100-gun Euryalus home to Falmouth to be flagship of the hastily formed squadron, which has been chosen to make the first British re-entry to the Mediterranean for nearly a year. As flag captain, Bolitho is made to contend with the unyielding attitudes of his new admiral.

The time is January 1782, and British Captain Richard Bolitho is ordered to take the frigate Phalarope to the Caribbean, where the hard-pressed royal squadrons are fighting for their lives against the combined fleets of France and Spain and the upstart American privateers.

Success to the Brave is the fifteenth Richard Bolitho story and chronologically it follows the events covered by A Tradition of Victory. In the spring of 1802 Richard Bolitho is summoned to the Admiralty in London and given his orders for a difficult and, to him, distasteful task.

The new year of 1774 seems to offer Richard Bolitho and his friend Martyn Dancer the culmination of a dream. Both have been recommended for promotion, although they have not yet gained the coveted lieutenant's commission.

Onward, a new 38-gun frigate whose first mission is not war but diplomacy, as consort to the French frigate Nautilus. Under the burning sun of North Africa, Bolitho is keenly aware of the envy and ambition among his officers, the troubled, restless spirits of his midshipmen, and the old enemy's proximity.

Every harbour and estuary is filled with ghostly ships, the famous and the legendary redundant in the aftermath of the war. In this uneasy peace, Adam Bolitho is fortunate to be offered the seventy-four gun Athena, and as flag captain to Vice-Admiral Sir Graham Bethune once more follows his destiny to the Caribbean.