Ramage's Prize

The greatest writer of swashbuckling, sea-fighting naval fiction since C.S. Forester has now brought his hero—the young Lieutenant Lord Ramage, R.N., aristocrat, adventurer, seaman, and romantic lover—to a confrontation with a secret plot that threatens to destroy the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars.
At the peak of the warfare against Bonaparte’s France, a vital link in the Admirality’s communications with the West Indies is inexplicably cut. The elegant Post Office packets, specially designed for speed, are not arriving at Falmouth. Whitehall and the British merchant community are starved of information, as crucial a commodity in this bitter conflict as powder and shot.
Meanwhile Lieutenant Nicholas Ramage, fuming with impatience, is ashore in Jamaica, waiting for his next posting. Tracing the reasons for the mysterious disappearing of the P.O. vessels in a million square miles of ocean will be difficult, hazardous and possibly suicidal, but Ramage’s superiors regard him as expendable; the mission is his.
Ramage sets out to track down the cause of these sinister losses: is it treachery, privateers or a new French secret weapon? Whatever the cause, the problem must be solved and the vital linkage restored.
The story of Ramage’s dangerous expedition and the unexpected involvement of the woman he loves is told with Dudley Pope’s usual skill, with his expert knowledge of the period and with the true sailor’s feeling for the sea and all its perils.