By Dorison & Lauffray
Publisher: Cinebook
ISBN: 978-1-84918-062-7
Set many years after the events in Treasure Island, this first volume in a new series claims not to be a sequel but merely a homage. And what a good job they do to.
Lady Vivian Hastings has been abandoned by her husband who has sailed to the New World to seek out an ancient fortune. Her standard of living is ever-diminishing and she fears that she may lose her estate, so makes the decision to consider her husband dead and find a new husband – a plan that leaves her pregnant but potentially saved. However, just as she is about to seal the new union her brother-in-law arrives with a native of the Amazon with news of her husband, Lord Hastings. The estate and all their possessions are to be sold to help fund his adventure and Lady Hastings is to be confined to a convent. She decides her last hope is to take matters into her own hands and go with the ship that is to rendezvous with her husband and the vast treasure he claims to have found.
However, her intentions are not those of a wife doing her duty but of a woman wanting revenge on her husband for stripping her of everything that was once hers. She aims to take as much of the gold for herself, and to do this she needs help, and so is directed to a man with a peg leg and a fearsome reputation.
This is a tremendously good book, full of menace and danger, despicable characters and loathsome deeds. It captures the spirit of the original work and presents it beautifully with page after page of wonderfully evocative illustrations that draw you in to the age of pirates. Long John Silver himself is written very well indeed, playing down the character slightly rather than building him up, and so making him all the more believable and dangerous. I'm already looking forward to the next instalment.
And if you liked that: For more adventure, try The Scorpion
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