#FORWARD THE LIGHT BRIGADE SERIAL#

More murders result, and Victorian justice takes control. Watched by a pioneering philanthropist aiming to reward the survivors of the Light Brigade with a pension, and endured by a resilient woman whose own secret drives the story to its tragic climax, there can only be one outcome in the vendetta. But mainly, it is a story about revenge and guilt that transports the reader across three continents and finally back to Britain, where a Russian double agent is still on the loose. It is also the story of the man who may have been responsible for the senseless charge at the battle of Balaklava in 1854. However, my novel The Last of the Light Brigade is a murder mystery based on fact and relates the story of two soldiers in the second half of the nineteenth century through journals and private letters. Kipling’s poem is a far cry from those contemporaries who sought to glorify the charge, like Alfred Lord Tennyson, and those of the establishment who tried to sweep the blunder and its casualties under the carpet. They had neither food nor money they had neither service nor trade, They were only shiftless soldiers, the Last of the Light Brigade. There were thirty million English who talked of England’s might, There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night. The title comes from one of Rudyard Kipling’s lesser-known poems telling of the plight of penniless soldiers after the Crimean War, especially those who survived the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade only to find poverty and hardship on their return to Victorian England: My second historical novel is now nearing completion, and I hope to launch it in the Autumn of this year!

#FORWARD THE LIGHT BRIGADE SERIAL#

But will the real Butcher Jack be killed before Roberts reveals the identity of the spy and serial killer? Everything depends on the testimony of others, the love of a selfless woman, and the murderous secret that haunts one man's hope of redemption.

Roberts is drawn into the murky world of Victorian espionage, soldier's tales, and psychological deception, hoping to discover who is to blame for Britain's worst military blunder. Or is he? Who is 'Butcher Jack' Vahey of the 17th Lancers who should have died from cholera in the Indian Mutiny? How did a Russian spy deceive the British army so many times in the Crimean War? And why are some of the survivors of the Light Brigade being hunted down and murdered forty years later? One of the last survivors of the famous Charge of the Light Brigade is a destitute pensioner living in a Liverpool workhouse. But that morning, Jack had decided his life was insignificant he knew six hundred men were about to die, and he had to do something to save them.

He knew what he sought to do that day was a reckless act and that he might be killed along with his mates. He judged they were about a mile away, a seven-minute ride if the pace was forced. Jack Vahey’s bleary and blood-shot eyes fixed on the line of Russian guns sat motionless in the valley. It is in fact the battle of balaclava, if you read the poem The Charge of the Light Brigade it will be more clear. North Valley, Balaklava, Crimea, 25 October 1854: The Napoleonic wars are a good guess however it is more likely to be the Crimean war between The Russian Empire at the time and the British Empire, French Empire, Ottoman empire and the kingdom of Sardinia.

Forward the light brigade