Robert N. Macomber – författare

Robert Macomber's Honor series of naval fiction follows the life and career of Peter Wake in the U.S. Navy during the tumultuous years from 1863 to 1901. At the Edge of Honor is the first in the series and winner of the Patrick D. Smith Literary Award for Best Historical Novel of Florida.The year is 1863. The Civil War is leaving its bloody trail across the nation as Peter Wake, born and bred in the snowy North, joins the U.S. Navy as a volunteer officer and arrives in steamy Florida for duty with the East Gulf Blockading Squadron. The idealistic Peter Wake has handled boats before, but he's new to the politics and illicit liaisons that war creates among men. Assigned to the Rosalie, a tiny, armed sloop, Captain Wake commands a group of seasoned seamen on a series of voyages to seek and arrest Confederate blockade-runners and sympathizers, from Florida's coastal waters through to near the remote out-islands of the Bahamas.Wake risks his reputation when he falls in love with Linda Donahue, whose father is a Confederate zealot, and steals away to spend precious hours with her at her Key West home. Their love is tested as Wake learns he must make the ugly decisions of war even in a beautiful, tropical paradise—decisions that take him up to the edge of honor.

Robert Macomber's Honor series of naval fiction follows the life and career of Peter Wake in the U.S. Navy during the tumultuous years from 1863 to 1901. Point of Honor is the second in the series and winner of the John Esten Cook Literary Award for Best Work in Southern Fiction.

The year is 1864. Peter Wake, U.S.N., assisted by his indomitable Irish bosun, Sean Rork, is at the helm of the schooner St. James, a larger ship than his first command in At the Edge of Honor. Wake's remarkable ability to make things happen continues as he searches for army deserters in the Dry Tortugas, discovers an old nemesis during a standoff with the French Navy on the coast of Mexico, starts a drunken tavern riot in Key West, and confronts incompetent Federal army officers during an invasion of upper Florida.

Along the way, Wake's personal life takes a new tack when he risks reputation for love by returning to the arms of his forbidden sweetheart, the daughter of a Confederate zealot. Key West provides a unique setting for them to prove that their love is strong enough to overcome the insanity of the war. And through it all, even when surrounded by the swirling confusion of danger and political intrigue, Peter Wake maintains his dedication to balance on the point of honor.

Robert Macomber's Honor series of naval fiction follows the life and career of Peter Wake in the U.S. Navy during the tumultuous years from 1863 to 1901. Honorable Mention is the third in the series.

It's the fall of 1864. The Age of Sail is passing, and Lt. Peter Wake finds himself again in Key West, but this time in command of the steamer USS Hunt. He quickly plunges into action as he chases a mystery ship during a tropical storm off Cuba, deals with a seductively dangerous woman during a mission in enemy territory ashore, confronts death to liberate an escaping slave ship, and comes face to face with the enemy's most powerful warship in Havana's harbor. Wake is no longer alone in this dangerous world. His wife Linda, hiding in a pro-Union camp on Useppa Island, gives him a future to look forward to as the war nears its end. But then in January 1866, as most Union soldiers are preparing to go home, a powerful ocean raider shows up in a remote corner of the Caribbean, and Wake finds that for some the war is not over yet.

The first book in the series, At the Edge of Honor, received the 2003 Patrick D. Smith Literary Award for Best Historical Novel of Florida, and the second, Point of Honor, was named the 2003 recipient of the John Esten Cook Literary Award for Best Work in Southern Fiction.His sixth novel, A Different Kind of Honor, won the highest national honor in his genre: the American Library Association's 2008 W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction.

Robert Macomber's Honor series of naval fiction follows the life and career of Peter Wake in the U.S. Navy during the tumultuous years from 1863 to 1901. Dishonorable Few is the fourth in the series.

It is 1869. The United States is painfully recovering from the Civil War, and Lt. Peter Wake concludes the first shore duty of his career at Pensacola Naval Yard to become the executive officer of the USS Canton. Headed to turbulent Central America to deal with a former American naval officer turned renegade mercenary, Wake discovers that no one trusts anyone in that deadly part of the world—with good reason.

As the action unfolds in Colombia and Panama, Wake realizes that his most dangerous adversary may be a man on his own ship, forcing him to make a decision that will lead to his court-martial in Washington when the mission has finally ended.

This historical thriller will take the reader from the sinister streets of Cartagena to the reef-strewn coast of Nicaragua to the halls of power in Washington, D.C. Along the way, the ambitions of European empires, Latin American dictatorships, and American politics form a dark background to Wake's desperate search for a maniacal killer—and his own trial.

At the beginning of this fifth novel in Robert N. Macomber's award-winning Honor series, it is December 1873 and Lt. Peter Wake is the executive officer of the USS Omaha on dreary patrol in the West Indies. Lonely for his family, he is looking forward to returning home to Pensacola in a few months and rekindling his troubled marriage with Linda. But fate has other plans for Wake. He runs afoul of the Royal Navy in Antigua and a beautiful French woman enters his life in Martinique. Then he's suddenly sent off on staff assignment to Europe, where he is soon immersed in the cynical swirl of Old World politics. Wake finds himself running for his life after getting embroiled in a Spanish civil war. Then he gets caught up in diplomatic intrigue among the French, Germans, and British. But his real test comes when he and his old friend Sean Rork are sent on a no-win mission in northern Africa.

It's 1879, and Lt. Cmdr. Peter Wake, U.S.N., is on special assignment as the official American neutral naval observer to the War of the Pacific raging along the west coast of South America. Chile, having invaded Bolivia, has gone on to overrun Peru and controls the entire southeastern Pacific region. Washington, concerned over European involvement in the war and the French effort to build a canal through Panama, has sent Wake to observe local events. During Wake's dangerous mission—as naval observer, diplomat, and spy—he will witness history's first battle between oceangoing ironclads, ride the world's first deep-diving submarine, face his first machine guns in combat, advise the French trying to build the Panama Canal, and run for his life in the Catacombs of the Dead in Lima, Peru.

Macomber's sixth novel in the Honor series won the highest national honor in his genre: the American Library Association's 2008 W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction.

Cmdr. Peter Wake, Office of Naval Intelligence, is in French Indochina in 1883 on a secret mission for President Chester Arthur. The novel opens with Wake aboard a riverboat on the Mekong River. The mission sounded simple in Washington: deliver the American president's reply to a confidential naval offer from the king of Cambodia, while clandestinely assessing the region's political and military situation. Wake figures it will take two more weeks and he'll be homeward bound. Six months later, after nearly dying at the hands of opium warlords, Chinese-Malay pirates, and French gangsters; after suffering starvation at sea, surviving a typhoon, being marooned on a beach, and enduring a horrific full-scale battle—Wake is still there. Exhausted, frustrated, and scared, he and his motley band of companions can now testify that nothing is simple in the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Empire of Vietnam. This story illuminates the beginning of the bloody cultural clash that lasted for the next hundred years in Southeast Asia, with each side determined to avenge their honored dead.

The Honored Dead is the seventh in the award-winning Honor Series of naval historical fiction following the life and career of Lt. Cmdr. Peter Wake from 1863 to 1907, a time when the United States Navy helped America become a global power.

Commander Peter Wake, of the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, is in New York City in 1886, where he meets two intense young men who will dramatically influence his life: Theodore Roosevelt and José Martí. Presented with a secret coded message, he deciphers it for Roosevelt, and soon wishes he hadn't.

Returning to Washington, he is assigned to follow up on the secret message and uncover the extent of Cuban revolutionary activities between Florida and Cuba, along with investigating rumors of Spanish government agents operating in Key West.

The investigation takes Wake to places he thought he knew so well: Havana, Key West, Tampa, and the islands of Florida's southwest coast. But the further he delves, the more he realizes how much he doesn't know, and is drawn inexorably into the center of the most catastrophic event in Key West history, when over half the city was destroyed. And at the end, Peter Wake makes a decision that may well shock his readers—one involving the very darkest shade of honor.

Commander Peter Wake, U.S. naval intelligence agent, is in Florida in 1888 culminating an espionage mission to learn Spain's naval readiness in Cuba. He and sidekick Sean Rork are hoping to wrap it up and head home on their annual leave. But a beautiful woman from Wake's past shows up, begging him to find her missing son. He agrees, and thus Honor Bound, Wake sets off across Florida and through the Bahamian islands with a motley band, including a Smithsonian ethnologist, a naval architect, a Bahamian Seminole sailor, Russian spies, British military intelligence, and a Polish-Haitian soldier. The search for the boy leads Wake through an ever-deepening maze of international intrigue—and an ever more passionate relationship with the boy's enticing mother.

After enduring storms, mutiny, and shipwreck, Wake and his group find themselves deep in the jungles of Haiti and the alien world of the Bizango culture and the vodou religion. The trail leads Wake to the hidden lair of an anarchist group, only to learn they are planning to wreak havoc around the world—unless he stops it.

It's September 1888, and Commander Peter Wake, Office of Naval Intelligence, has been ordered to salvage a failed espionage operation against the Spanish Navy in Havana. His network of spies in the city has been compromised, international political tensions are escalating, the U.S. presidential election is looming, and Wake has five days to locate and rescue two of his network who are missing and assumed captured by the Spanish.

Wake immediately realizes that his old nemesis, Colonel Isidro Marrón, head of the dreaded Spanish counterintelligence service, has set the perfect trap to kill him. Wake's covert American team of experts in linguistics, chemistry, and lock picking are soon hard-pressed to simply stay alive as they struggle to carry out his hastily conceived plan. Amidst all of this chaos, Wake saves the lives of Havana's Spanish elite, forms a nervous friendship with the colonial governor, receives an odd message from his Cuban revolutionary friend José Martí, encounters the shadowy world of international Freemasonry, and discovers an unusual bond with the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt. Can Peter Wake trust anyone—or anything—in Cuba?

January 1889. German and American naval forces are engaged in an escalating confrontation in Samoa in the South Pacific. Warships are at battle stations. Naval reinforcements from both nations are on the way. The press in Berlin, Hamburg, Washington, and San Francisco is calling for national honor to be defended. At any minute, open warfare may erupt. All it will take is one spark.

President Grover Cleveland orders Commander Peter Wake, Office of Naval Intelligence, to clandestinely accomplish one of two things: either somehow prevent all-out war between Germany and America, or win it decisively at the outset to prevent combat from spreading worldwide. Coming up with an admittedly makeshift plan along the way, Wake enlists the help of an unlikely trio he encounters in the Pacific: a Hawaiian artillery officer, a renegade Methodist minister, and a beautiful widow. Unfortunately for Wake—and unbeknownst to him—each of them has his or her own motives for heading to Samoa. If he fails, thousands across the world will die. It is a dilemma right out of today's headlines: When do you cross the line of civilized behavior to potentially save lives? How do you live with the consequences? Amidst this dilemma, Wake decides to employ a repulsive tactic that results in horror for a member of his team, something he will regret for the rest of his life. The intrigue is as deadly as the action in this novel, which culminates in one of the most significant events in Pacific—and American—naval history.