SHARPE’S STORM is at the tail end of Bernard Cornwell’s enormously successful series in terms of the publication date, and fairly late when it comes to chronological order. As a result, there are quite a few callbacks to Sharpe’s earlier adventures as chronicled in previous installments. This can be a bit tedious at times for the dedicated, veteran reader; it’s even tedious for Sharpe, who gets annoyed at one point at a reference to his past heroics at Talavera. But for the casual reader, it’s a good reminder that there are other books in the series to consume if you like this one.

This latest entry is a perfectly reasonable part of the series, but it centers on the Battle of Saint-Pierre, a relatively unknown battle on the fringes of the Napoleonic Wars. This is not to say that it’s a bad story, or that Cornwell doesn’t approach it with his usual skill, but this is definitely a book for the completist.

"Where emotion comes into play is in the joy of battle... This is what Cornwell excels at and what has made the Sharpe books such a delight for most of my reading life."

The good news is that there isn’t a better time to begin this series than now. I latched on to Cornwell in the early part of this century after coming across an article about what to read while you wait for Patrick O’Brian’s next Aubrey-Maturin novel to come out. I went through the first tranche of books on the Peninsular Campaign, checking them out of the Atlanta Public Library, which has most of them. Cornwell then went back in time with a trilogy about Sharpe’s service in India, and then forward in time to an adventure where he confronted the exiled Napoleon in St. Helena. Right now, he is working on filling in the gaps in the Sharpe narrative.

The book that comes before SHARPE’S STORM chronologically is SHARPE’S REGIMENT, which was published (gulp!) 40 years ago. I probably read it 25 years ago, and some of that information relative to Sharpe’s current marriage is relevant to this book. But darned if I could remember what all of those circumstances were.

I suppose it’s not really important. The Sharpe novels are fairly uniform. If you read SHARPE’S REGIMENT today, there’s no way you could tell that it was written four decades ago. Cornwell was that good then and he’s that good now. The focus is on the battlefield, and there is a cracking battle in the book --- complete with an English colonel who is so much of a Cornwellian type that I was shocked to find in the factual appendix that he was a real person and a true coward.

In that same appendix, Cornwell mourns the death of his longtime editor, Susan Watt, and says that she was constantly telling him to share more of Sharpe’s emotions. But surely that is beside the point. Sharpe enjoys fighting, along with the blood, the mud and the killing. Where emotion comes into play is in the joy of battle, the feel of the bayonet in your hands, the sound of the famous seven-barreled gun resounding over the battlefield, the cries of the wounded, and the shouts of victory. This is what Cornwell excels at and what has made the Sharpe books such a delight for most of my reading life.