Royal Flash

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A new and crackling episode in the adventures of England's Number 1 scoundrel, that bully, liar, and womanizing coward named Flashman, whose youthful skulduggery was first revealed in Tom Brown's School Days. Now his voluminous, villainous memoirs (a first sampling, Flashman, surfaced last year) are little by little revealing how he disgraced himself and his Queen (who was not amused) from India to Little Big Horn in a trail of tangled bedsheets, angry husbands, and besmirched uniforms.

The scene of Royal Flash is the Europe of Revolutions, and of that ultimate in the advanced diplomacy of 1848, the Schleswig-Holstein Question.* Flashman is no diplomat, but he's right in the middle of this gigantic international double-cross, and when you're cheating, dodging, and playing for your life against the unholy alliance of Count Bismarck and Lola Montez, you'll stir up any amount of mud to save your skin. Prussia's greatest statesman and Europe's most active lady of the bedchamber are plotting a royal marriage that will change the destiny of a continent. Flashman is their luckless pawn. Blackmailed into doubling for a prince with a most inopportune and unsuitable disease (especially for a bridegroom, that is) he has to use all his reserves of deceit, low cunning, and treachery to stay one hop ahead of pursuing death. The Prisoner of Zenda? Here's what really happened.

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