We are led into historical fiction with an enlisted man that saves a General and is commissioned an officer. Since he's not from the "right" background many, but not all, of the other officers mistreat him. Still he is a gifted soldier and eventually retires a bird and still comes to the rescue of his former enlisted men. The whole series is a good read.

While listening to this book, I would jump into the car to run any errand my wife asked of me so that I could find out what would happen next to Captain Richard Sharpe, commander of the light company (skirmishers) of the South Essex battalion.

I've read/listened to about 8 of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, and Sharpe's Escape was one of the most riveting. Cornwell's description of the battles completely immersed you in the action. It was easy to love the loyal Sgt Harper and hate the mean, bully Feregus.

Like all Cornwell's novels, I was completely taken in by his ability to bring you inside early the 19th century British army -- how they operated, their strategy, and their maneuvers like the About Face, Wheel Right in the battle of Bussaco ridge or forming a square in the lines of Torres Vedras.

The narrator does a great job with English accents but uses that same accent for French and Portuguese characters. Also, Sharpe's final fist-t-cuffs fight with Feregus seemed contrived. In the end Sharpe says you should always fight dirty, but Sharpe could have easily avoided the fight by just shooting Feregus once Feregus attempted to escape.

I'm sort of glad I waited to begin this series until it was virtually complete, since they're written out of order by their internal chronology. It's mid-1810 now, and Wellington has finally gotten a grip on the French attempts to sew up Portugal and thereby deny access to the entire coastline of Europe. He's backing slowly down the coast and destroying crops, food stores, grazing animals, windmills, and anything else that might be of use to the enemy. When he gets to the big ridge at Bussaco, he forms up his Anglo-Portuguese army (still considerably small than the French force) and waits. Marshal Massena was far too confident and didn't realize that British training of the previously unimpressive Portuguese forces had made them a serious threat. Cornwell's at-length account of the resulting battle, the most famous in Portugal's history, is quite accurate and almost physically exhausting to read in its descriptions of individual unit actions and grand strategy. Later, the British withdrawal leads the French to their appalled discovery of the Lines of Torres Vedras, a massive series of fortifications crossing the peninsula on which Lisbon is locating, the construction of which was (amazingly) kept secret. (It was financed by the Spanish coin recovered in _Sharpe's Gold,_ by the way.) The confrontation at the end between the French skirmishers and the South Essex's Light Company before the defensive fortifications is also very well done. Meanwhile, Capt. Richard Sharpe has been temporarily pushed out of his command by his colonel's attempts to give a leg up to a drunken brother-in-law. Then Sharpe runs up against a Portuguese intelligence officer trying to play both sides of the street, just in case the French win. And he has a thuggish brother, a huge man, who enjoys killing his enemies by beating them to death with his bare hands. Sharpe and Sgt. Harper don't fight fair, though. Oh, and there's a fair maiden to be rescued as well -- an English governess unlike any of Sharpe's women in the earlier volumes. This is an exciting and, as usual, historically accurate story, both in its broad events and in its details.