Politics, love, and war swirl around Captain Peter Wake (USN) in Havana when the USS Maine explodes on a quiet evening in February 1898. Working with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt in the tense prewar days, carrying out a perilous espionage mission inside Cuba, and leading a disastrous raid on the Cuban coast, Wake is in the middle of it all.
The Popular Fiction silver medalist in the 2017 Florida Book Awards, this is the first of three dynamic books set during the Spanish-American War in the Caribbean, when America changes forever into a global power.
Robert N. Macomber is an internationally recognized, award-winning maritime writer, lecturer, television commentator, expedition leader, and researcher, specializing in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Named the "2020 Writer of the Year" by the Florida Writers Association, he is best known as the author of the acclaimed Honor Series of naval novels and is proud to have readers across the globe. His awards include the Florida Genealogy Society's Outstanding Achievement Award for his nonfiction work on Florida's maritime history, the Patrick Smith Literary Award for Best Historical Novel of Florida (At the Edge of Honor), and the John Esten Cooke Literary Award for Best Work in Southern Fiction (Point of Honor). He is the guest author at regional and international book festivals and was named by Florida Monthly magazine as one of the 22 Most Intriguing Floridians of 2006. His sixth novel, A Different Kind of Honor, won the highest national honor in his genre: the American Library Association's 2008 W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction. Each year, Macomber travels approximately 15,000 sea miles around the globe, giving lectures and researching his novels.
An Honorable War takes the reader on a journey of passion and drama that history often overlooks. With the Spanish-American war as a backdrop, Robert Macomber weaves a great story of not only honor, but action and love. --James O. Born, best-selling author
Macomber's delicious storytelling--a combination of riddles, action on the sea and ashore, well-drawn characters, and exotic locations--is a praiseworthy entry in the naval fiction genre. His rip-roaring narrative is engaging, while chronicling a consequential period in American history.
My advice is to sign on early and set sail with Peter Wake for both solid historical context and exciting sea stories!
At last we have an American character the equivalent of Hornblower or Aubrey.
Macomber is the O'Brian of the Caribbean.
The Peter Wake novels are more than just gripping stories about life at sea--they offer a carefully rendered, historically accurate imagining of America's naval history in the second half of the 19th century.
Macomber is today's foremost practitioner of a fascinating subgenre--historical fiction of the nautical variety. Building his series on the imagined autobiography of Peter Wake, he's given readers a vivid, multi-dimensional hero. Macomber makes the remarkable times he portrays glow. . . . History comes alive.
Robert Macomber writes well and inspiringly so--giving voice to the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps and its officers and enlisted men (ratings) now lost to memory. . . . Does Wake work? Yes, in many ways he captures the essential--which is, no doubt, why he has so many followers on both sides of the Pacific and Atlantic.