Blockade Runner

Written by David Kent-Lemon
Review by Alan Fisk

Shipping clerk Tom Wells impresses his employers in 1861 London so much that they entrust him with the administration of their blockade-running trade to the Confederacy, operating out of Nassau in the Bahamas.  It isn’t just a desk job. Tom has to make many voyages on the blockade-running ships back and forth to the Carolinas. The trade is highly profitable but also highly dangerous, and it nearly costs him his life.

His home base in Nassau is safe from shot and shell, but not from disastrous personal entanglements. He also has, if not a girl in every port, one in North Carolina whom he had met when she visited London.

I must admit that in the middle of this novel I was feeling that it was starting to sag, but then the strands of the plot snapped together to bring a decisive, if not entirely happy, ending.