Death and Glory (Barker & Llewelyn, #15) by Will Thomas Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Barker & Llewelyn #15
Pages: 304
Published by Minotaur Books on April 23, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Private Enquiry agent Cyrus Barker, along with his partner Thomas Llewelyn, has a long, accomplished history - he's taken on cases for Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office, and even the crown itself, fulfilling them all with great skill and discretion. None of those cases, however, are as delicate and complicated as the one laid before him by a delegation of men who, thirty years before, fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. These men want to revive the Confederacy with a warship promised to the Rebels from the British Government in 1865. To get it now, they're threatening to reveal the long-secret treaty with the Confederacy. Barker is hired to use his connections to discreetly bring their threats to the Prime Minister.
With a web of prominent, if secret, supporters throughout England ready to through their support to their efforts to wage war anew on the United States, the delegates are just waiting for the warship to begin their plans. But some of the men are not who they claim to be, and the American government has their own team watching, and waiting, for the right moment to take action.
As this fuse on this powder keg of a situation grows ever shorter, it's up to Barker & Llewelyn to uncover the real identities and plans of these dangerous men.
My Review:
Usually that title phrase is “Death OR Glory”, a commitment to an undertaking that will result in one OR the other. In other words, a variation on Patrick Henry’s oft-quoted phrase, “Give me liberty or give me death!”.
Then again, when Henry uttered his famous line, the outcome of the American Revolution had not yet been decided.
Very much on the other hand, by the time this 15th novel in the Barker and Llewelyn series begins in April of 1894, the cause that has brought General James Woodson, Brigadier David St. Ives, Colonel Zebedee Beauford and Captain Manuel Cortes to their offices has been lost for nearly 30 years. Or so history tells us – and tells Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn – even as their American visitors claim that the Confederacy they STILL serve has continued in exile AND has unfinished business with the British government.
Unfinished business in the form of a very old contract, a forgotten promise, and a once glorious warship now in use by the British Navy as a training vessel.
The men don’t expect Barker to resolve their issues. But their leader hopes that he can arrange a meeting with the newly appointed Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery. Which Barker certainly can, and does, arrange. Not because he either believes or trusts these men, and not even because their leader invokes the name of a secret society that he believes to be closely akin to Barker’s own Knights Templar – which it honestly isn’t – but because Barker doesn’t quite believe them, no matter how much their documents appear to be genuine.
His cooperation ensures his ability to keep an eye on them, and on whatever machinations they have planned. Because it’s clear that they are playing a larger game than first appears. The question is whether they are merely perpetuating a confidence game on a rather grand scale, or whether their intentions are, or have already been, deadly. Or all of the above.
Escape Rating A: First, this was a right book at the right time situation for me. I read this a month ago, while I was in the middle of a red-eye flight, and I was awake – as usual. Reading remains the best method of being somewhere else when you have to remain physically where you are, and I needed to be elsewhere. Elsewhen if possible. Barker and Llewelyn always deliver. So my body was somewhere over the Rockies (I think) while my brain was in London in the 1890s wondering what the hell a bunch of Confederate officers were doing in London 30 years after Appomattox. So were the brains of both Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, so I was in excellent company.
This story fascinated me on two levels. First, there’s the obvious question of what these men are up to in the first place. They might be “true believers”. This might all be an elaborate con. It might be both. It might also be at least somewhat real at the same time, which doesn’t rule out any of the above.
Then there’s the underlying story, that the “Myth of the Lost Cause” was already entrenched in the public consciousness. And it was a myth, then and now. The war was about slavery, and the Confederacy LOST. Period. Which does not mean that the battle for hearts and minds had ended 30 years later – or perhaps ever will. We STILL live in its aftermath.
Because this story takes place in 1894, it revolves around events that are already history. Thirty years is a long time. (Thirty years ago for us would be the mid 1990s, BEFORE the turn of the current century. A lot has happened in our interim, just as a lot had happened in theirs. A small matter of the Industrial Revolution, for example.)
So, on the one hand, for the old Confederates who had come to London, time is running out. Even if they were young men in 1865, they no longer were. Coming to London, with an old treaty in their hands and a questionable claim on an old warship, is their last personal grasp – or gasp – at either death or glory in pursuit of their cause. Time has marched on.
For the British, IF the treaty is real and the claim is true, there’s the potential for a great deal of international embarrassment. Britain did not officially side with the Confederacy during the US Civil War, but they did depend on Southern cotton before it, did want their supplies restored, and might very well have committed something in writing that seemed economically reasonable at the time – whether it, or the Confederacy’s cause, was morally reprehensible or not.
Thirty years afterwards, it would have resulted in a great deal of worldwide opprobrium and a huge loss of face for an empire that was already beginning to show cracks around the edges.
The race in this one, or perhaps the cat and mouse game, was to figure out what the old soldiers were really after and to keep them from getting it. The problem that Barker and Llewelyn faced was the way that roles of pursuers and pursuit kept shifting. Barker always intends to be the cat, but in this particular game, the mouse was more than wily enough to keep him and his partner dancing to their tune every bit as often as he made them dance to his.
This was a particularly fascinating entry in the series for me. Not quite as much sheer fun as the previous book, Heart of the Nile, but more compelling in its implications AND even more interesting in the way that the ending is a bit equivocal in that it wraps up all the loose ends yet isn’t nearly as successful in its outcomes as Barker would have wished.
I only have two books left in the series, Season of Death and For Services Rendered. I can’t wait to catch up, but I’m not looking forward to the (probable) year-long wait for the book after that.
