The Pilot of the Blockade
A Novel of Medieval War

About this book:

Milo of Ragusa came to the English Channel to pilot merchant cogs through treacherous tides, not to wage war. But when a French fleet—Genoese galleys, Norman cogs, and Breton mercenaries—drops anchor off Oakhaven and the King's Admiral is trapped in the Thames, the harbor becomes a cage. With the town's own pilots paralyzed by guild jealousy and the castellan desperate for anyone who knows the shifting shoals, Milo finds himself pressed into a deadly game: turn the estuary's deadly sandbanks and fickle currents into a weapon, or watch four hundred merchant hulls burn.

From the forecastle of a wallowing Flemish cog to the stone ramparts of Castle Montfort, *The Pilot of the Blockade* plunges you into the salt-stung reality of medieval naval warfare. Here, victory depends not on cannon broadsides but on reading the color of the water, the taste of the mud on a sounding-lead, and the rhythm of a tide that rises twenty feet twice a day. Milo must outthink a Genoese admiral who fights with oars and Greek fire, navigate the treachery of English merchants who would sell the harbor to save their wool, and turn a motley garrison of militia, archers, and wet powder into a fighting force—before the flood tide carries the enemy through the King's Trench.

Gritty, immersive, and pulsing with the clang of iron and the roar of the sea, this is historical fiction at its sharpest: a siege fought on water, where the channel itself is the battlefield, and the pilot who knows its secrets holds the only lever that matters.