The Bloodingby James McGeePegasus Books, 2015James McGee's series of rattling good yarns featuring soldier-turned-espionage agent Matthew Hawkwood began back in 2006 with Ratcatcher and continued through four other novels and a dozen deliciously-concocted adventures in the service of Regency England in its long struggle against Napoleonic France. During the course of those adventures, McGee has gradually and carefully revealed bits and pieces of Hawkwood's personal background, and in the latest novel, The Blooding, now published in the United States from Pegasus Books, that gradual process of learning about our hero is considerably accelerated. We get many glimpses into his past in the course of The Blooding, breaking up the headlong momentum of its typically well-constructed plot, as when Hawkwood's memories are jogged by “the familiar scent of the woods or the snatches of remembered birdsong”:

In his mind's eye he saw a twelve-year-old boy lost in a forest wilderness, surrounded by shadows. Whether the shadows were cast by men or beasts, he did not know. He could not make out details. He knew only that some were friend and some were foe and that his life depended on being able to tell the difference.

The Blooding finds Hawkwood in America in 1812, trapped by the sudden eruption of the War of 1812. He's making his way north to the safety of the Canadian border when he spots a former ally of his, Major Douglas Lawrence, who's now a prisoner of war in Albany. Hawkwood naturally intervenes to free his friend, and the two of them continue the desperate flight to Canada, now charged with knowledge of an impending American invasion of the country. Both men are past masters of personal violence, and McGee is every bit as skilled at providing them opportunities for violence as are other purveyors of this kind of testosterone-dunked historical fiction, writers like Bernard Cornwell and, a generation ago, Dennis Wheatley. At every step of the journey Hawkwood takes with Lawrence, the two men encounter danger from hostile Indians to English soldiers to cutthroat opportunists on both sides, and McGee serves up all of it with a gusto that scarcely flags for a moment in 500 pages. At every turn, the atmospherics are ratcheted up to Gothic proportions:

With the forest casting black shadows across the open space, Hawkwood's first impression was that he was looking at a clutch of wooden fence posts that had been left in the ground to rot. It was only as the wagon drew closer to the hummock in which they were planted that he realized these weren't fence posts at all, they were shovel handles. And the hummock wasn't a natural hummock, either. It was a mound of excavated soil.And as Lawrence uttered a despairing “Sweet Jesus!” the stench rose to meet them. Fighting back the bile surging into his own throat, Hawkwood saw the edge of the pit.

Like all the other volumes in this series, The Blooding is fully accessible to newcomers who haven't taken in Hawkwood's earlier adventures – McGee seems particularly careful about that. But those newcomers will very likely go find the previous volumes anyway: this is very confident, addicting storytelling.