Nate's Reviews > Birds of Prey

It’s a book about pirates/privateers double-crossing each other, duking it out with each other on land and sea, and doing other fun stuff with healthy doses of kinky boning and horrid violence. What’s not to like?! Seriously though, I was very impressed with my first book of Mr. Smith’s. All of the good stuff that historical fiction lovers like is here; lots of period detail, sightseeing, larger-than-life characters, historical context, and so on and so forth. I guess when it comes to publishing order this is like halfway through the Courtney family series but I always prefer to read by the in-story chronological order and this seemed to be the first Courtney tale. It kinda reminded me of L’Amour’s Sackett stories, but with glory holes (not a joke.)

We follow our hero Henry “Hal” Courtney as he assists his father Francis on his quest to capture a Dutch East India ship laden with spoils somewhere near the coast of Africa. Soon the story branches out to include several point of view characters (all interesting, surprisingly enough) and becomes a full-blooded historical adventure with all kinds of chases, battles, romance, revenge, etc. Like I mentioned earlier, it’d be hard to find a hist fic box that Smith doesn’t check over the course of the 700 or so pages. Yes, this is arguably brick-sized, but it never dragged and I finished it surprisingly quick. There’s just always another fun scene of derring-do, lurid sex, or historical tidbittery lurking around the next corner.

As I mentioned earlier, the characters were pretty much all interesting if not likable. Hal is a perfectly serviceable main character and his dad is a brave, stern hardass who’s easy to admire. Hal’s buddy Aboli is an awesome sidekick who could easily have been the star of his own novel. Sadistic black widow Katinka was captivating in the grossest way. Seriously, every time Smith (literally) had her thighs getting all slippery when she thought about dudes getting hung or tortured I had to shake my head in bewildered wonderment. What a woman! Colonel Schreuder was a very hateable douchebag but consistently entertaining. Slow John was a creepdick for the ages...imagine being consigned to a torturer whose first few months of action just consists of opening the slot to your cell door and staring at you. Blegh.

I’m kind of wondering at this point why I slept for so long on Smith’s books as they are thoroughly entertaining and, if not classic literature, written well. He kind of reminds me of Cornwell but with a lot more sex (and obviously focused on Africa and not England.) Of course, the other side of the coin is I have like 50 more books to (potentially) enjoy. I’m very intrigued as to Hal’s further adventures but I’ve also heard from multiple sources that Smith’s Ancient Egypt epic River God is great stuff as well. Oh well, just more agonizing literary problems here in the first world to deal with. Woe is me. I heartily recommend this sizable piece of action to fellow historical fiction lovers, but just be warned that I really am not playing up the amount of times someone gets killed horribly or the dreaded beast with two backs makes an appearance, so if you don’t like that kind of stuff maybe just read a Cadfael book or somethin’.