In the original dustsheet. Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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Matthew Hervey, newly appointed aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington, is sent on a secret mission to India. With the embers of war cooling to a precarious peace across Europe, Hervey must leave behind his love, Henrietta, to travel to a foreign land which will test his mettle to the very limits.

Reviews:
Historical fiction is enjoying a new golden age at present, with ever more impressive military heroes joining the ranks. Alan Mallinson, author of The Nizam’s Daughters and a serving cavalry officer, has already achieved considerable praise for his brand of derring-do in his first novel A Close Run Thing, which is generally acclaimed as a debut of real excitement and verve. With The Nizam’s Daughters, the author has overcome the second hurdle with equal aplomb. In Mallinson’s second novel, Matthew Hervey of the Light Dragoons, fresh from the Battle of Waterloo, is newly appointed as aide de camp to the Duke of Wellington. Hervey is sent on a clandestine mission to India (leaving behind his fiancée Henrietta) to travel to an alien land seething with intrigue. At the princely state of Chintal, Hervey undertakes his mission: to discover the intelligence that will allow the Duke to forge lasting alliances if (as he expects) he becomes Governor General of India. Needless to say, Hervey soon finds himself way out of his depth, as Chintal is a city threatened from all sides. The massing forces of the Nizam of Haidarabad, whose expansionist policies are backed up by the eponymous Nizam’s Daughters, a legendary artillery brigade, provide the most sinister menace.Mallinson has studied the masters of the historical adventure genre well, and is particularly adroit at creating the dangerous and dirty reality of the soldier’s lot. The author’s experience of horseborne warfare serves him well in pitching the reader into the heart of the battles fought by his beleaguered hero. There are those who may fear that the author’s military credentials may be the reason he has been commissioned to write these books rather than any storytelling skills but even a cursory glance at the first chapter should abuse anyone of that idea. Mallinson is a genuine storyteller, with a gift for the striking image: Another volley came, felling two more. Hervey sprang up and rushed to one of them, lifting him across his shoulder and taking up his musket in his free hand. Peto did the same as another welter of musket balls assailed them. One struck the silver pouch of Hervey’s crossbelt, and with such force that he was knocked clean to the ground. Peto, having dropped his man in a doorway, dashed to him, but he was already on his hands and knees retching with the pain and gasping for the air that had been knocked out of him. And still the firing continued…–Barry Forshaw

• Fresh from the battle of Waterloo, Matthew Hervey, newly appointed aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington, is sent on the most secret of missions to India. With the embers of war cooling to a precarious peace across Europe, Hervey must leave behind his newly affianced love, Henrietta, to travel across tempestuous seas to an alien land which, unbeknown to him, will test his mettle to the very limits. Hervey’s destination is the princely state of Chintal, his mission to glean the essential intelligence and forge the lasting alliances that will serve the Duke if, as he expects, he is appointed Governor-General in India. But the situation Hervey finds is unforeseen. Chintal is in a perilous position, seemingly threatened from all sides. From the north come the Pindarees, roving bands of renegades who regularly make raids into the country. But more alarming still, on the western edge of the province are massing the forces of the Nizam of Haidarabad, Chintal’s expansionist neighbour, backed by his legendary artillery – the Nizam’s Daughters – known and feared throughout India. With little warning Hervey finds himself drawn into a conflict as hot and fiery as that which he had so recently left in Belgium. Now, without the accustomed support of his dragoons, Hervey must take a stand and decide where in the coming conflict his loyalties will lie. Rarely has a novelist so evocatively captured the nature of horse-borne warfare, or the humanity of a soldier’s lot. In the continuing adventures of Matthew Hervey, Allan Mallinson has combined a storyteller’s art with an eye for accurate detail to create a true hero, not only of his time but also for our own.

Brigadier Allan Lawrence Mallinson (born 6 February 1949) is an English author and retired British Army officer. Mallinson is best known for writing a series of novels chronicling the (fictional) life of Matthew Hervey, an officer serving in the (fictional) British 6th Light Dragoons from the late Napoleonic Wars through subsequent colonial conflicts in India, North America and South Africa.