Legion (The Raven and the Eagle series Book 1)
In 6 AD Pannonia, Corvus is a legionary—section commander in the second century of the second cohort of the Eighth Legion. Thanks to a longish stretch of relative peace, he is in the odd position of being something of a veteran while having seen almost no combat at all, but he is very, very eager to change that. A brooding fellow with obvious trauma in his past, Corvus seems to care for very little beyond his “brothers”—his closest comrades and Marcus, his beloved childhood friend—and the chance to lose himself in violence. When that chance finally arrives, in the form of Tiberius’ huge campaign against the Marcomanni tribes, Corvus is happier than he has been in years… until the auxiliary troops raised for the campaign mutiny, and the Eighth Legion finds itself facing overwhelmingly superior numbers in vicious guerilla warfare in the mountains.
Jones has seen service, and his first-hand knowledge of a soldier’s inner workings is clear and convincing, and especially poignant when it deals with the dynamics of fire-forged friendship. Perhaps a couple of changes of heart come across as a little abrupt, and the too-careful avoiding of Roman naming patterns is a tad distracting, but these are minor faults in a robustly written story that explores the reasons for and the brutality of war.
