SHARPE’S PREY: Ridchard Sharpe and the Mission to Copenhagen, 1807 opens with Sharpe having a very dark night of the soul, having lost the fortune he brought back from India and the woman he won in SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR, and discovering the Rifles don’t like jumped-up enlisted men any more than the rest of the army—all of which leads to him volunteering to become minder for an emissary to Denmark only to discover the emissary has plans to sell out to the French. A rather grim one, from Sharpe’s murdering an old foe at the start to having one of his superiors covertly arrange the murder of the heroine near the book’s end, and the bloody assault on Copenhagen in the middle. And that wraps up the prequels.
It’s to Cornwell’s credit that if I didn’t know better, SHARPE’S RIFLES: Richard Sharpe and the French Invasion of Galicia, 1809 would feel like mid-series-the only awkwardness in matching the retcons is that there’s not the least reference to his Dead Love in his pursuit of the Pretty Girl here. Otherwise, this fits very well with Sharpe’s rising arc of self-confidence as he proves himself to the rifles, Harper reluctantly accepts stripes and a Spanish saint rides again. It is a surprise that this great assault on Santiago was pure fiction when all the prequels are set amidst historical battles (as is the next retcon book, SHARPE’S HAVOC). Still, well done.
URANIUM: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner, tells how the useless mining waste known as pitchblende became useful first as a pretty paint, then as a radium source, then in its own right as people started realizing what would happen if two pieces slammed together. This is old hat to me in spots (the Manhattan Project, the forged Niger documents) but does a good job covering the history of uranium mining (and how trendy and cool uranium was 50 years ago) and the black market (concluding that it’s long past the point at which all the uranium can be corralled).
