George MacDonald Fraser
Narrator: Jonathan Keeble

Last seen in Flashman and the Tiger (2000), that incomparable English rogue, Sir Harry Flashman, is up to his usual amatory and military hijinks in the 12th installment of Fraser's masterful Flashman papers. Having seduced a silly Austrian princess on the ship bearing the body of Maximilian, the ill-fated emperor of Mexico, back home to Trieste in 1867, Harry eludes the offended Austrian authorities by seizing the chance to become the British envoy on a mission to rescue a group of European hostages held by the mad Abyssinian king, Theodore. (When Whitehall neglected to respond to the polite letter Theodore wrote Queen Victoria, he took captive a few hundred unfortunate foreigners.) This now obscure expedition, which made headlines in its day, provides the kind of sardonic history lesson fans have come to relish. Allusions to adventures not yet published tantalize, notably those to do with Flashman's role in the U.S. Civil War. Fraser has nibbled at the edges (Flashy was there for John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1995's Flashman and the Angel of the Lord), and one can only hope that the next volume does more than simply mention such iconic names as Gettysburg.