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Jack Lark #10
Commander
'Like all the best vintages Jack Lark has aged to perfection. Scarred, battered and bloody, his story continues to enthral' ANTHONY RICHES
A true leader serves his men.
The Jack Lark series is historical military fiction at its finest, for fans of Bernard Cornwell and Matthew Harffy. This is the tenth adventure featuring Jack Lark: soldier, leader, imposter.
Egypt, 1869. Jack Lark is working as an official agent for the Consul-General. He crosses paths with famous explorer Sir Samuel White Baker, who has been engaged by the Pasha of Egypt to lead an expedition into the Sudan to eradicate the slave trade and open the area to commerce.
And when Sir Sam offers Jack employment, it's an offer he can't resist...
Praise for the Jack Lark series:
'Brilliant' Bernard Cornwell
'Enthralling' The Times
'Bullets fly, emotions run high and treachery abounds... exceptionally entertaining historical action adventure' Matthew Harffy
'Expect ferocious, bloody action from the first page' Ben Kane
'You feel and experience all the emotions and the blood, sweat and tears that Jack does... I devoured it in one sitting' Parmenion Books
A true leader serves his men.
The Jack Lark series is historical military fiction at its finest, for fans of Bernard Cornwell and Matthew Harffy. This is the tenth adventure featuring Jack Lark: soldier, leader, imposter.
Egypt, 1869. Jack Lark is working as an official agent for the Consul-General. He crosses paths with famous explorer Sir Samuel White Baker, who has been engaged by the Pasha of Egypt to lead an expedition into the Sudan to eradicate the slave trade and open the area to commerce.
And when Sir Sam offers Jack employment, it's an offer he can't resist...
Praise for the Jack Lark series:
'Brilliant' Bernard Cornwell
'Enthralling' The Times
'Bullets fly, emotions run high and treachery abounds... exceptionally entertaining historical action adventure' Matthew Harffy
'Expect ferocious, bloody action from the first page' Ben Kane
'You feel and experience all the emotions and the blood, sweat and tears that Jack does... I devoured it in one sitting' Parmenion Books
334 pages, Unknown Binding
Published October 28, 2021
45 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Paul Fraser Collard
18 books137 followersPaul's love of military history started at an early age. A childhood spent watching films like Waterloo and Zulu whilst reading Sharpe, Flashman and the occasional Commando comic, gave him a desire to know more of the men who fought in the great wars of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. At school, Paul was determined to become an officer in the British army and he succeeded in winning an Army Scholarship. However, Paul chose to give up his boyhood ambition and instead went into the finance industry. Paul stills works in the City, and lives with his wife and three children in Kent.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 13, 2022
In Commander, the tenth book in the Jack Lark series, Paul Fraser Collard's melancholy hero faces the challenge of the untamed wilderness of Egypt and the Sudan. As if the heat, vegetation-clogged rivers, savage wildlife and vicious hunters were not obstacles enough, Jack Lark must once again confront something that proves much more difficult to vanquish: the darkness that drives him. The title of the novel could just as easily refer to its author as to its protagonist, for Paul Fraser Collard commands the genre of historical action adventure with as much aplomb as Jack Lark commands his troops.
November 11, 2021
I have been suffering a reading ennui for a few years, and have restricted what reading time I have to my main subject and era: Imperial Rome. It was a simple time thing. I had no time to read, and no inclination really, given that I was editing and reading my own work over and over again.
Then, this summer, I made the decision that I needed to drop work for times and actually rediscover reading. I started with a make-or-break foray into a new author: L J Trafford. It worked. Her books enthused me and rekindled my love of historical fiction. I read all four volumes of her excellent series in a row. Then there was that horrible moment. If you’re a reader, you’ve come across it. You finish a breath-taking series, and there is almost no chance that the next book you read will come close.
This is when it helps to have a set number of authors on your list who are so damn good that they could write a shopping list and you’d finish it and be waiting breathlessly for volume 2. There are only a few writers that guarantee me that, and most of my go-tos I am up to date with. I was incredibly lucky therefore to discover that Paul Fraser Collard’s latest Jack Lark book was now out.
I started reading Paul’s books back when he released his first novel, The Scarlet Thief, eight years ago. Scarlet Thief introduced us to Jack Lark, a character who, despite unexpected depths, fits into the traditional and comfortable mould of the ‘loveable rogue’. Jack steals the uniform of British officer heading out to service and assumes his identity, leaving behind a crappy life of poverty in London’s East End. His deception takes him to the Crimea and to the battle of the Alma, one of history’s less famous, but more bloody, battles. But Jack’s ruse cannot last, and when the first book finished, I could not understand how Paul could write a sequel.
But write a sequel he did. I read it voraciously. And astoundingly, he managed to keep Jack moving as a principle character, and even advance him. I was hooked. I read every Jack Lark as it was released. He moved through India and Persia, Italy, then across to America in time for the civil war and beyond. Then, as I mentioned earlier, I lost all my free reading time, and stopped following fiction for 2 years.
I picked up Commander. As it happened, although I’d missed the book in between this and the last one I read, my OCD collector thing meant that I had bought Fugitive anyway. The time had come.I read Fugitive, having finished Trafford’s series, and was immediately straight back into the Jack Lark world, loving every minute as he struggled across Abyssinia. I ran straight on with Commander. The odd thing is that though Jack has changed over a decade of books, and can be quite dark at times, even in his bleakest moments, the reader connects to him, because that ‘loveable rogue’ from book 1 has never been vanquished.
Commander takes Jack from Egypt in the British colonialist’s dream of opening up the heart of Africa to British trade and governance. It is an adventure fair and square. Taking an unexpected offer of employment from a true British adventurer, Jack is given the mandate to form a small elite corps from Sudanese and Egyptian troops to help the enigmatic ‘Sir Sam’ take a massive convoy and army upriver from Khartoum. He meets a fascinating French ivory trader with whom his destiny is entwined, and so begins an expedition into the wilderness. The sheers scale of the British plan is stunning, and I wondered how Paul was going to cover it in any less than three books, but the story that unfolds is pacy, exotic and thoroughly satisfying.
Part of the great value of this book is the feel and atmosphere it evokes. From early on, it gave me the urge to watch the movie The Ghost and The Darkness again. It is deeply evocative of the untamed wilderness of Sudan and central Africa. There is hardly a moment or a scene in it that fails to translate from the page to the mind’s eye with instant smoothness. It is almost cinematic in its atmosphere.
But there is more. Commander is at least as much an exploration of the psyche of the soldier, the mercenary, the colonialist and the killer as it is an adventure. Jack is a damaged man. Sometimes he realises it and makes and effort to deal with it. Sometimes he blindly accepts it, and plays the role nature seems to have dealt him. This book presents him with an ethical dilemma, and is a struggle for Jack to accept himself. He is a taciturn man, a straight talker, but the one person he repeatedly seems to dissemble with is himself. In the heart of Africa, though, with a small corps of soldiers, in the midst of ivory and slave trading and wicked, wicked men, he will find his soul laid bare.
He will find redemption.
If you have read the other Jack Lark books, be assured that this tenth volume is every bit as good as the first and is a tour de force. If you have read none of them, hunt down the Scarlet Thief and start your journey. You’ll not be disappointed.
Then, this summer, I made the decision that I needed to drop work for times and actually rediscover reading. I started with a make-or-break foray into a new author: L J Trafford. It worked. Her books enthused me and rekindled my love of historical fiction. I read all four volumes of her excellent series in a row. Then there was that horrible moment. If you’re a reader, you’ve come across it. You finish a breath-taking series, and there is almost no chance that the next book you read will come close.
This is when it helps to have a set number of authors on your list who are so damn good that they could write a shopping list and you’d finish it and be waiting breathlessly for volume 2. There are only a few writers that guarantee me that, and most of my go-tos I am up to date with. I was incredibly lucky therefore to discover that Paul Fraser Collard’s latest Jack Lark book was now out.
I started reading Paul’s books back when he released his first novel, The Scarlet Thief, eight years ago. Scarlet Thief introduced us to Jack Lark, a character who, despite unexpected depths, fits into the traditional and comfortable mould of the ‘loveable rogue’. Jack steals the uniform of British officer heading out to service and assumes his identity, leaving behind a crappy life of poverty in London’s East End. His deception takes him to the Crimea and to the battle of the Alma, one of history’s less famous, but more bloody, battles. But Jack’s ruse cannot last, and when the first book finished, I could not understand how Paul could write a sequel.
But write a sequel he did. I read it voraciously. And astoundingly, he managed to keep Jack moving as a principle character, and even advance him. I was hooked. I read every Jack Lark as it was released. He moved through India and Persia, Italy, then across to America in time for the civil war and beyond. Then, as I mentioned earlier, I lost all my free reading time, and stopped following fiction for 2 years.
I picked up Commander. As it happened, although I’d missed the book in between this and the last one I read, my OCD collector thing meant that I had bought Fugitive anyway. The time had come.I read Fugitive, having finished Trafford’s series, and was immediately straight back into the Jack Lark world, loving every minute as he struggled across Abyssinia. I ran straight on with Commander. The odd thing is that though Jack has changed over a decade of books, and can be quite dark at times, even in his bleakest moments, the reader connects to him, because that ‘loveable rogue’ from book 1 has never been vanquished.
Commander takes Jack from Egypt in the British colonialist’s dream of opening up the heart of Africa to British trade and governance. It is an adventure fair and square. Taking an unexpected offer of employment from a true British adventurer, Jack is given the mandate to form a small elite corps from Sudanese and Egyptian troops to help the enigmatic ‘Sir Sam’ take a massive convoy and army upriver from Khartoum. He meets a fascinating French ivory trader with whom his destiny is entwined, and so begins an expedition into the wilderness. The sheers scale of the British plan is stunning, and I wondered how Paul was going to cover it in any less than three books, but the story that unfolds is pacy, exotic and thoroughly satisfying.
Part of the great value of this book is the feel and atmosphere it evokes. From early on, it gave me the urge to watch the movie The Ghost and The Darkness again. It is deeply evocative of the untamed wilderness of Sudan and central Africa. There is hardly a moment or a scene in it that fails to translate from the page to the mind’s eye with instant smoothness. It is almost cinematic in its atmosphere.
But there is more. Commander is at least as much an exploration of the psyche of the soldier, the mercenary, the colonialist and the killer as it is an adventure. Jack is a damaged man. Sometimes he realises it and makes and effort to deal with it. Sometimes he blindly accepts it, and plays the role nature seems to have dealt him. This book presents him with an ethical dilemma, and is a struggle for Jack to accept himself. He is a taciturn man, a straight talker, but the one person he repeatedly seems to dissemble with is himself. In the heart of Africa, though, with a small corps of soldiers, in the midst of ivory and slave trading and wicked, wicked men, he will find his soul laid bare.
He will find redemption.
If you have read the other Jack Lark books, be assured that this tenth volume is every bit as good as the first and is a tour de force. If you have read none of them, hunt down the Scarlet Thief and start your journey. You’ll not be disappointed.
November 1, 2021
HIGHLY recommended. Another brilliant Jack Lark adventure done and dusted for me. Each Paul Fraser Collard novel is better than the last and Commander is a ripping tale surrounding a part of history I had no idea about beforehand. Always good to learn something new whilst enjoying a novel. Hope Lark makes it, eventually, after many other adventures, to Rorke’s Drift!
November 23, 2021
Yet again another great book from Paul Fraser Collard, following the trials and tribulations of Jack Lark. Awaiting in anticipation for the next book in the series, hopefully not to far away.
May 26, 2022
The wonderful Jack Lark novels get better every time. PFC's research is excellent as always taking us to a hitherto unknown corner of Africa. Looking forward to the next saga in Africa - Diamond Hunter.
November 7, 2021
Jack Lark is one of my favourite fictional heroes and it's good to see him back, this time accompanying an expedition down the Nile to secure trade routes while fighting (literally) those who trade in human beings. Jack is starting to feel his years... I loved the Nile setting and the expedition battles horrendous conditions as the river narrows and the crocodiles watch. There is violence and I did skip over some parts of that. Review to follow shortly on For Winter Nights.
December 11, 2021
Good read as usual ....... a bit more filler (too much/many descriptions of what people were wearing) than normal for Paul ..... normally No filler All killer ..........
August 7, 2022
Book number 10 in Paul Fraser Collard's Jack Lark series - a series which has, over time, moved away from its earlier Richard Sharpe stylings, which (and, at least, in The Scarlet Thief) it seemed to wear proudly on its sleeve.
To be clear: that's neither a con nor a pro: just something to be aware of!
In this one, the latest at the time of reviewing, Jack Lark is in Egypt, between employment (well, of a salubrious sort), when he is offered the opportunity to join an expedition into the Sudan, taking charge of new recruits in doing so.
What follows is the delays and danger (both of the natural variety as well as the man-made) of such an expedition into the wilderness, including the hunting of Elephants for ivory (on an industrial scale), slave trading and other such unsavoury pursuits which the expedition both aims to take part in and to stop.
As for Lark himself? He comes across as more melancholy than I remember from previous entries; more given to introspection than before. However, he also seems to end the novel in a better place than when he started: let's see how long that lasts!
To be clear: that's neither a con nor a pro: just something to be aware of!
In this one, the latest at the time of reviewing, Jack Lark is in Egypt, between employment (well, of a salubrious sort), when he is offered the opportunity to join an expedition into the Sudan, taking charge of new recruits in doing so.
What follows is the delays and danger (both of the natural variety as well as the man-made) of such an expedition into the wilderness, including the hunting of Elephants for ivory (on an industrial scale), slave trading and other such unsavoury pursuits which the expedition both aims to take part in and to stop.
As for Lark himself? He comes across as more melancholy than I remember from previous entries; more given to introspection than before. However, he also seems to end the novel in a better place than when he started: let's see how long that lasts!
August 16, 2022
1869 Cario, Egypt: Jack Lark has become an unofficial agent to the British Counsel-General and even if it's abit boring it pays fairly well. Of course a boring Jack won't be bored for long as the Counsel-General has this friend, whose name happens to Sir Samuel White Baker, the famed explorer who has his eye on the African interior for his latest project, and Sir Samuel needs someone who can lead a small force.
Well of course Jack takes the job. So it's up the Nile to Khartoum where he hones together a force of forty men made up of Sudanese and Egyptian troops, who are a ragged bunch, but with Jack's leadership they eventually become a force.
The Nile pass Khartoum is a dangerous place especially with a horrible vine like substance that blocks the river. If that weren't all there are a group of men lead by a Frenchman named DuBois, who is out to destroy every elephyat and tribe along his way, who happens to ahead of Baker and Jack.
As always lots of history here because we meet Lady Florence Baker, Sam's nephew, Julian and his niece Anna. The times in which they lived, and the dangers of Africa.
What's next for Jack Lark...The Wheel of Fate is spinning.
Well of course Jack takes the job. So it's up the Nile to Khartoum where he hones together a force of forty men made up of Sudanese and Egyptian troops, who are a ragged bunch, but with Jack's leadership they eventually become a force.
The Nile pass Khartoum is a dangerous place especially with a horrible vine like substance that blocks the river. If that weren't all there are a group of men lead by a Frenchman named DuBois, who is out to destroy every elephyat and tribe along his way, who happens to ahead of Baker and Jack.
As always lots of history here because we meet Lady Florence Baker, Sam's nephew, Julian and his niece Anna. The times in which they lived, and the dangers of Africa.
What's next for Jack Lark...The Wheel of Fate is spinning.
March 2, 2025
The most disappointing of the series so far. The storyline was a little weak, suggesting Mr C tried to make a story about a part of African history that interested him .... but there were not enough characters or baddies or real drama to make the story capturing. And would a (relatively) innocent society lady be allowed to wander off with wor Jack into the unknown? I perservered to the end, but it ws not enjoyable. Let's just hope #11 is a better read with more drama, charcters and sideline plots.
January 1, 2025
Mejora la serie, aunque sigue en el argumento de “pongo un malo malísimo archienemigo del protagonista y hasta la confrontación final”. Pero este libro se deja leer mejor que el anterior. Falta uno para acabar la serie, que si no ya la habría dejado. B-
December 31, 2021
DNF - I’m a huge fan of the series but this book just fell flat for me. I made it to 70% done and it was a struggle. It was slow and felt whiny, only my opinion of course chum…
August 10, 2022
Good read hopefully will be another one.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews