The Baltic Gambit: An Alan Lewrie Naval Adventure [Paperback]

I look forward to each new book as this series appears and, as ever, The Baltic Gambit does not disappoint. Much of the action takes place ashore -- it is almost 200 pages before Lewrie gets a ship, and 300+ pages before a gun is fired in anger -- but I enjoyed reading about Lewrie's time in London. Lambdin provides this pleasure on several levels. One the one hand, Alan Lewrie continues to grow and mature. (Of course, he is pushing 40.) As the story moves through Lewrie's courtroom victory over the odious Beauman family, he actually begins to tire of nightly bacchanals and starts to rise early and read seriously about world affairs (providing the author with an excellent way to provide geo-political context to the modern reader.) While not entirely immune to feminine charms and entanglements, he eschews the damn-the-consequences rutting of his younger days. He even makes efforts to curb the most flagrant of his excesses in deference the the straight-laced, proto-Victorian abolitionists who sponsored his defense. On the other hand, Lambdin's confident mastery of place and time has the reader wide-eyed and avid every time Lewrie sets out from his lodgings. High and low, rich and poor, honest folk and scoundrels, King's English and rogues' cant -- we meet a colorful and varied set of characters at every turn.

On the final hand, we are treated to Lambdin's sly narratorial voice. The book is narrated from the conventionally strict third-person omniscient point of view. Except. Except, Chapter Six opens with these words: "The Admiral Boscawen Coffee House, at the corner of Oxford Street and Orchard Street (site of the present day Selfridge's)..." Wow! This sole explicit intrusion of the 21st Century into the book colors the whole story. It tells us that we must drop all pretense that perspective is limited to 1801. Suspend disbelief at your own risk, reader -- you have been warned that you'll need to be looking through two lenses at the same time: Alan Lewrie's from 1801 and Dewey Lambdin's puckish view from 2009. At one point, Lewrie muses about an abolitionist who cares nothing for the suffering of slaves because his sole object is to tear the United States apart. (After all, the North and South are sure to be at each other's throats if slavery is abolished.) I can almost hear that 21st Century narrator chortling over his own cleverness.

Once Lewrie gets his ship, the frigate Thermopylae, we settle with a happy sigh into enjoying Lambdin's peerless passages of ship handling and fighting. Lewrie's cruise in the Baltic is, like the best of his adventures, ambiguous. The naval mission is combined with a "diplomatic" task, arranged by his shadowy mentor, Zachariah Twigg. The story culminates with a fine fictional account of the Battle of Copenhagen, including Nelson famously turning the blind eye and a cameo appearance by William "Breadfruit" Bligh. As always, we are left wondering about several unresolved threads which Lambdin promises to take up in the next book, King, Ship, and Sword.

Slightly disappointing. I've always believed Dewey Lambdin to be a 5 star writer.I've demoted him for this novel. I love Alan Lewrie and identify with his character, but The Baltic Gambit suffered slightly from a turgidness (or is it turgidity?)in the opening 120 pages. I was growing impatient - which hasn't happened before.Too many echoes of the court case,which has permeated several novels. No action. Nothing "new" to report for Lewrie fans and readers like me. Very few new relationships. Not a lot of "behind the scenes at the Admiralty" glimpses.The second half of the book was more satisfying. Am I alone in wishing that the author would send Lewrie away from the established "main events" of British naval history for a time? And it's about time we were given insight once again into Caroline's life,bringing up a family with an errant and absent husband.Dewey's usually excellent at giving a colourful picture of real life in England at the turn of the 19th Century.
By the way, we've had a basinful of Russian acrobat beauties with irascible fathers! Please kill them off,Mr Lambdin!

Its the expected good yarn about our Alan, but its downright cruel to let the reader hang after flipping to the last pages to see if Caroline and Alan will kiss and make up? Come on Mr. Lambdin, don't let us faithful readers hang there too long.
Wolf de Vallette

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 13 reviews  4.2 out of 5 stars