Nautical fiction from the Age of Sail encompasses time when other things were in the world besides wooden ships and iron men. Our hero is an iron man and Campbell takes pains to show us just how tough he is for a lad right around the age of 18.

But we leave a great deal of the nautical part aside in this telling. We also have a great deal of this story reliant on some of the last book which makes a great part of the telling of this story not stand on its own, but rather needing the previous book. Thus it is more a duology.

Now can we believe our young newly minted lieutenant would take on shore based tasks that point him to such horror and brutality that perhaps it is a time of history and atrocity that is best left in dry history books. When fictionalized the brutality of the time still sounds horrific and something perhaps best blotted from my mind. The terror of a sea battle is more than enough, why bring a race war into things as well.

But moving beyond that, the plot is convoluted, with not one, but more than one secret agent, and more than one false identity. Just following it all tired my mind, but then we returned to the sea finally for the last sixth of the book and here we were back on familiar water.

Perhaps for me that is why I don't give this book higher marks. The hero has something that you want to appreciate. But we strayed too much to the dark side, and land. If we had stayed at sea where familiar derring do could be had, I might have found the book more enjoyable. ( )

In this sequel to Campbell’s first novel, No Quarter, Matty Graves, now a lieutenant aboard the schooner USS Rattle-Snake, is given a mission ashore. Sent to assess the situation, he finds himself at the siege of Jacmel – the final stand of Haiti’s mulattos under Alexandre Pétion who are battling freed slaves led by the legendary Toussaint L’Ouverture for control of the country. Both sides claim legitimacy; both sides claim to be champions of liberty; both sides commit unimaginable atrocities. Close-in fighting with machetes gave the War of Knives its name and Campbell describes this in detail, but battle scenes are only the beginning of the horror as Matty moves toward his own heart of darkness. Matty tries to make sense of the action and track down rumors of a plot against the United States, but nobody is what he seems. He becomes a pawn in games he doesn’t understand as he struggles to sort friend from foe.

I like this book a lot, although it may not appeal to readers who are looking for straightforward naval adventure. It is not a page-turner in the conventional sense of a book that you can’t put down because of the engrossing action – more accurate to say that we are pulled along in awful fascination as Matty’s journey of self-discovery unfolds. Campbell’s humor takes a macabre turn in The War of Knives but, as in the earlier book, it is heavily based in language, and the interplay among English, French and Creole comes to play a pivotal role in the story. In a moment of enforced idleness, Matty’s friend sets out to teach him Creole and we are treated to a page and a half of Creole grammar and syntax. I was delighted, but this may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Still, you should read this book. Campbell does an impressive job of mining an obscure corner of history for elemental human drama. He probes deeply into the meaning of friendship, betrayal, survival, race and language in the context of unforgettable adventure. ( )