Sail and Steam

In the first novel of a thrilling new trilogy, author Sutton Stern covers untrodden ground: the U.S. Navy's rapid rise in power and prestige during the decades before the Civil War. Robby Run takes us to the action-packed Rio de la Plata region of South America for a rich and vivid story of corruption and brutality in the midst of the Guerra Grande or Great War involving Argentina, Uruguay, and Europe's powers. Robby Run also delivers a startlingly fresh story of romance and heartbreak. It's June of 1845. Young Lieutenant Robert Chase Roebuck has been assigned to a remote Revenue Marine station in the new state of Florida, but a chance encounter with the Navy's "Old Bruin", Captain Matthew Calbraith Perry, changes everything. Perry's extraordinary career provides the backdrop for this trilogy, from his fight at sea against the slave trade through his ingenious command of U.S. Naval forces at Vera Cruz during the war with Mexico and on to the opening of Japan with his famous black steam ships. Roebuck has been living in a kind of self-imposed exile; but Perry sees that the young Lieutenant is a fighter and that the Navy needs more officers in what he calls the "fighting navy". This leads to a brevet command for Roebuck of the U.S.S. Savannah, a speedy and agile frigate in need of a captain. Roebuck's mission: to rescue American merchant sailors taken captive and enslaved in South America. Punished by the weather, hunted by French patrols and undermined by a mutinous first officer, the nail-biting race against the clock becomes the first of many battles Roebuck must fight. With gripping you-are-there immediacy, the author Sutton Stern takes us inside the maelstrom of Uruguay's "Guerra Grande", where politics, intrigue and violence aren't the only things awaiting him. He makes a powerful ally of the intoxicating Doña Belén, who makes him an offer that, while hard to refuse, could ruin his already disgraced family name forever. For the historically inclined, Robby Run is cast with figures of enormous significance to South America's past like Italian patriot Giussepe Garibaldi, naval hero of the Argentine Confederation Admiral William Brown, and warlord Juan Manuel de Rosas, bringing an exotic and exciting twist to the nautical adventure genre. Based on a little-known historical event in which a rogue French Admiral captured two American merchant brigantines in the estuary of Rio de la Plata, Robby Run sweeps across the tail of South America during the brutality and wreckage of civil war. A story of ambition, betrayal, love and heartbreak, it combines the action of C.S. Forester's Hornblower series with Elmore Leonard's rich characterization and dialog.