Birds of prey Book

Rating: 3* of five

Wilbur, Wilbur...yours isn't the stuff of literary legend, but usually you buckle a *mean* swash and cause images of Erroll Flynn to dash around your reader's head (thanks for that, BTW).

In this book, Wilbur, you lost your way. I don't expect autheticity of language, and don't even WANT it, in books set in the 17th century. But sometimes I felt I was watching a mini-series dumbed down for a TV audience as I read this installment of the generational saga of the Courteneys. Plenty of buckles are swashed, it's true, and the hated Dutch East Indiamen are suitably hateful, but things were...foreshortened, somehow.

Could it be the Courteneys are beginning to pall in your interests? I haven't read Assegai, the most recently published of their family saga which is set in WWI times, and now I wonder if I should.

This isn't the Smith to start with. If anyone wants to know what the fuss he's made over the years is about, start with The Sunbird. "Fly for me, bird of the sun...." *snivel* Still makes me mist up.


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