Sharpe's Tiger (Sharpe Series #1) by Bernard Cornwell

From the Publisher

As the British army fights its way through India toward a diabolical trap, young private Richard Sharpe must battle both man and beast behind enemy lines.

It's 1799, and Richard Sharpe is just an illiterate young private in His Majesty's service, part of an expedition sent to push the ruthless Tippoo of Mysore from his throne and drive his French allies out of India.

Posing as a deserter, Sharpe must penetrate into the Tippoo's city and make contact with a Scottish spy being held prisoner there. Success will mean winning his sergeant stripes; failure, being turned over to the Tippoo's brutal executioners — or his man-eating tigers. Picking his way through an exotic and alien world, one slip will mean disaster as Sharpe learns that he must fight his old comrades in order to save his own neck. Along the way, he keeps an eye out for Mysore's beautiful prositutes, any stray loot he can get his hands on and the chance to learn his ABC's. But when the furious British assault on the city begins, Sharpe must fight with the fierceness and agility of a tiger himself to foil the Tippoo's well-set trap — and to keep from being killed by his own side.

Philadelphia Inquirer

The world may have a new literary hero. His name is Richard Sharpe.

Library Journal

Cornwell's popular Richard Sharpe novels have marched his army hero through India campaigns and Europe's Napoleonic Wars, while raising him from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel. Sharpe's Tiger goes back to when Sharpe was an illiterate private in southern India in 1799. Despite Sharpe's humble station, Cornwell gives him one of his greatest adventures, making him appear to be a deserter who joins the enemy army of the Tippoo of Mysore. In this precarious position, Sharpe faces not only the danger of being exposed--and possibly fed to tigers--but of being killed by his own countrymen. Throw into this mix his feud with the psychotic Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, and we have one of the most gripping and satisfying stories in the entire saga. Frederick Davidson's strong reading makes this a nearly perfect audiobook; another can't-miss acquisition for most libraries.--Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Internet Bookwatch

In Sharpe's Tiger, Richard Sharpe must fight behind enemy lines as the British army seeks to overthrow the tyrant Tippoo of Mysore and drive his French allies out of India in 1799. Bernard Cornwell is a master storyteller with the ability to rivet his readers attention to his vivid plots, exotic yesteryear scenarios, and memorable characters. This superbly produced, unabridged audiobook edition featured the magnificent narrative skills of Frederick Davidson who truly brings alive the thrills, dangers and plot twists that are the hall mark of Bernard Cornwell's historical adventures.

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Table of Contents

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It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England. None that he had seen, anyway. Ugly things they were. Rats with wings.

He thought about vultures a lot, and he had a lot of time to think because he was a soldier, a private, and so the army insisted on doing a ot of his thinking for him. The army decided when he woke up, when he slept, when he ate, when he marched, and when he was to sit about doing nothing and that was what he did most of the time—nothing. Hurry up and do nothing, that was the army's way of doing things, and he was fed up with it. He was bored and thinking of running.

Him and Mary. Run away. Desert. He was thinking about it now, and it was an odd thing to worry about right now because the army was about to give Richard Sharpe his first proper battle. He had been in one fight, but that was five years ago and it had been a messy, confused business in fog, and no one had known why the 33rd Regiment was in Flanders or what they were supposed to be doing there and in the end they had done nothing except fire some shots at the mist-shrouded French and the whole thing had been over almost before young Richard Sharpe had known it had begun. He had seen a couple of men lolled. He remembered Sergeant Hawthorne's death best because the Sergeant had been hit by a musket ball that drove a rib clean out of his red coat. There was hardly a drop of blood to be seen, just the white rib sticking out of the faded red cloth. "You could hang your hat on that," Hawthorne had said in a tone of wonder, then he had sobbed, and after that he had choked up blood and collapsed. Sharpe had gone on loadingand firing, and then, just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, the battalion had marched away and sailed back to England. Some battle.

Now be was in India. He did not know why he was invading Mysore and nor did he particularly care. King George III wanted Richard Sharpe to be in India, so in India Richard Sharpe was, but Richard Sharpe had now become bored with the King's service. He was young and he reckoned life had more to offer than hurrying up and doing nothing. There was money to be made. He was not sure how to make money, except by thieving, but he did know that he was bored and that he could do better than stay on the bottom of the dungheap. That was where he was, he kept telling himself, the bottom of a dungheap and everyone knew what was piled on top of a dungheap. Better to run, he told himself. All that was needed to get ahead in the world was a bit of sense and the ability to kick a bastard faster than the bastard could kick you, and Richard Sharpe reckoned he had those talents right enough.

Though where to run in India? Half the natives seemed to be in British pay and those would turn you in for a handful of tin pice, and the ice was only worth a farthing, and the other Indians were all fighting against the British, or readying to fight them, and if he ran to them he would just be forced to serve in their armies. He would fetch more pay in a native army, probably far more than the tuppence a day Sharpe got now after stoppages, but why change one uniform for another? No, he would have to ran to some place where the army would never find him, or else it would be the firing squad on some hot morning. A blast of musket shots, a scrape in the red earth for a grave, and next day the rats with wings would be yanking the guts out of your belly like a bunch of blackbirds tugging worms out of a land.

That was why he was thinking about vultures. He was thinking that he wanted to run, but that he did not want to feed the vultures. Do not get caught. Rule number one in the army, and the only rule that mattered. Because if you got caught the bastards would flog you to death or else reorganize your ribs with musket balls, and either way the vultures got fat.

The vultures were always there, sometimes circling oil long wings that tilted to the sudden winds of the warm upper air and sometimes standing hunched on branches. They fed on death and a marching army gave them a glutton's diet, and now, in this last year of the eighteenth century, two allied armies were crossing this hot fertile plain in southern India. One was a British army and the other belonged to a British ally, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and both armies provided a feast of vulture fodder. Horses died, oxen died, camels died, even two of the elephants that had seemed so indestructible had died, and then the people died. The twin armies had a tail ten times longer than themselves: a great sprawl of camp followers, merchants, herders, whores, wives, and children, and among all of those people, as it did among the armies themselves, the plagues ran riot. Men died with bloody dysentery, or shaking with a fever or choking on their own vomit. They died struggling for breath or drenched in sweat or raving like mad things or with skins blistered raw. Men, women, and children all died, and whether they were buried or burned it did not matter because, in the end, the vultures fed on them anyway, for there was never enough time nor sufficient timber to make a proper funeral pyre and so the vultures would zip the half-cooked flesh off the scorched bones, and if the bodies were buried then no amount of stones heaped on the soil would stop the scavenging beasts from digging up the swollen, rotting flesh and the vultures' hooked beaks took what the ravenous teeth left behind.