BLOOD FOR BLOOD

McMillin (The Butcher’s Daughter, 2015, etc.) continues the story of the fictional pirate-queen Bloody Mary in this swashbuckling sequel.

In the previous installment, things had just begun to look up for Lady Mary, the smuggler leader and the illegitimate heir to an Irish royal line. Shortly after helping defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588—and thus repaying a debt she owed to Queen Elizabeth I—Mary and her crew killed the leaders of a rival smuggler clan, the Síol Faolcháin. Unfortunately, this victory begets tragedy when Kayne Dowlin, the leader of the Síol Faolcháin survivors, ambushes the now-pregnant Mary in a remote mill, murdering her lover, James Hunter. Later, after leaving her newborn daughter in the hands of friends, Mary sets out to reassemble her crew and reacquire her ships before checking in with her patron, the queen. Elizabeth suggests that Mary join the massive retaliatory expedition that Sir Francis Drake and Sir Black John Norreys are planning against Spain. For both Mary and Elizabeth, the order of the day is lex talionis, the law of retaliation—an eye for an eye, or, as Mary prefers it, “blood for blood.” But as Mary well knows, revenge is a dangerous pursuit, and it will take her from the Iberian peninsula to the New World and back to Ireland. McMillin’s prose, as narrated by Mary, is as full of romance and swagger as one would expect in a tale of a pirate captain: “A biting wind ripping across the harbor cut into my bones as I walked my horse down the narrow streets of the old Barbican Quarter where Drake was using the home of a wealthy merchant as his headquarters.” The author’s aim seems to be to transport Mary to as many colorful locales as possible, and he certainly does so over the course of this book. Although the characters that surround her are all pretty stock, the novel upholds the fine tradition of old high-seas adventure stories with a pace that doesn’t let up until the final cutlass clatters to the deck.

A purely entertaining adventure novel of a fearless woman in a most dangerous line of work.