0.5. Rogue
London, before Jack Lark becomes a soldier. Growing up around his mother’s East End gin palace, Jack knows the alleys, rough company and hard bargains of the city better than he knows any respectable life. When an unexpected connection draws him into the glittering world of…
0.6. Recruit
Forced to leave London, Jack Lark takes the Queen’s shilling and enters the British Army believing a red coat may offer the future denied to him in the East End. Training quickly strips away any romance. Sergeant Slater rules the recruits through humiliation and violence, while…
0.7. Redcoat
Private Jack Lark has survived years of discipline and now wears his red coat with pride, but ordinary barrack life is no longer enough. At Aldershot he sees a chance to become an officer’s orderly and move beyond the limits imposed on a common soldier, even…
1. The Scarlet Thief
Crimea, 1854. Jack Lark has escaped the poverty of London’s East End by taking a dead officer’s identity, but the deception places him in command when the King’s Royal Fusiliers come under devastating fire on the banks of the Alma. With men looking to him for…
2. The Maharajah’s General
Wounded after the Alma and stripped once again of a secure identity, Jack Lark seizes another dead officer’s name and travels to India. Exposure as a fraud forces him into the protection of the Maharajah of Sawadh, where survival depends on proving that the military knowledge…
3. The Devil’s Assassin
Bombay, 1857. Jack Lark’s fraudulent career finally comes to the attention of Major Ballard, an intelligence officer who sees usefulness where others would see only disgrace. Ballard sends him with the British expedition to Persia, where a military campaign over Herat is complicated by the discovery…
4. The Lone Warrior
Bombay, 1857. Honourably discharged and intending to return to England, Jack Lark is diverted by a promise to escort Aamira away from danger. Their journey carries them to Delhi just as rebellion erupts across northern India, trapping them in a city where military mutiny rapidly becomes…
5. The Last Legionnaire
London, 1859. Jack Lark returns to his mother’s East End gin palace hoping that years of fighting can finally be put behind him, but civilian life offers neither peace nor a clear place to belong. A fresh debt to Major Ballard pulls him back into intelligence…
6. The True Soldier
Boston, 1861. Jack Lark arrives in the United States as secession turns political crisis into civil war. He enlists as a sergeant in the Union army and discovers a conflict unlike the imperial campaigns he has known: men around him are choosing to fight for causes…
7. The Rebel Killer
The American Civil War has given Jack Lark a cause and then taken almost everything from him. After defeat and personal loss, he crosses hostile territory disguised in Confederate grey, pursuing the man he believes responsible for destroying the future he had begun to imagine with…
8. The Lost Outlaw
Louisiana, 1863. Jack Lark leaves the battlefield behind and takes work guarding a valuable wagon train carrying cotton through Texas toward Mexico. The job promises distance from organised war, but the route is threatened by violent outlaws, divided loyalties and employers whose ambitions are almost as…
9. Fugitive
London, 1868. Jack Lark has built a profitable new life in Whitechapel, but a clash with a powerful criminal leaves him wanted and forces him back toward the one institution that has repeatedly offered escape: the army. He joins the British expedition into Abyssinia, a vast…
10. Commander
Egypt, 1869. Jack Lark works unofficially for the British Consul-General in Cairo until an opportunity arises to join explorer Sir Samuel White Baker on an expedition south into the Sudan. Jack takes command of a small elite force protecting the river flotilla, but authority proves more…
11. Diamond Hunter
South Africa, 1871. Jack Lark and Anna Baker travel to the Cape Colony diamond fields hoping that a successful claim can finance the independent life they have fought to build together. The diggings draw fortune seekers from across the region, and competition quickly turns violent as…