Perilous Shore - Chris Durbin

Amphibious warfare was in its infancy in the mid-eighteenth century - it was the poor relation of the great fleet actions that the navy so loved...That all changed in 1758 when the British government demanded a campaign of raids on the French Channel ports. Command arrangements were hastily devised and a whole new class of vessels was produced at breakneck speed: flatboats, the ancestors of the landing craft that put the allied forces ashore on D-Day.Commander George Holbrooke's sloop Kestrel is in the thick of the action: scouting landing beaches, duelling with shore batteries and battling the French Navy.In a twist of fate, Holbrooke finds himself unexpectedly committed to this new style of amphibious warfare as he is ordered to lead a division of flatboats onto the beaches of Normandy and Brittany. He meets his greatest test yet when a weary and beaten British army retreats from a second failed attempt at Saint-Malo with the French close on their heels.Perilous Shore is the sixth of the Carlisle & Holbrooke naval adventures. The series follows Holbrooke and his mentor, Captain Carlisle, through the Seven Years War and into the period of turbulent relations between Britain and her American colonies in the 1760s.