Authors M - Maco
Maass, Edgar (1896-1964)
The Magnificent Enemies. Scribner's, 1955. 343 pages
Piracy and adventure set in the background of the Hanseatic League
Mac, Gerard
Pilgrims. St. Martin's, 1994. 319 pages
The journey to the New World of Daisie Mason, 19, one of 102 people who made the celebrated voyage on the Mayflower. The novel portrays the strife, love and death on the journey, in which a third of the passengers did not survive.
Macaulay, David
Ship. Houghton Mifflin, 1993. 96 pages
Discovery and exploration of a wrecked Spanish caravel by marine archeologists, and the story of its construction. Excellent drawings. For young Readers.
Macdonald, Robert S.
The Catherine. Petrocelli, 1982. 303 pages
While Captain Saunders prepares to take charge of the United States Navy warship, the Catherine, and fight in the Civil War, he falls in love with his brother's wife.
Macdonell, A. G. [Archibald Gordon] (1895-1941)
The Crew of the Anaconda. Macmillan, 1940. 300 pages
A mismatched couple foil the Reich's plan to blockade England
Macgregor, James Murdoch (1925-2008)
When the Ship Sank. Doubleday, 1959. 236 pages
The fates of six women after the torpedoing of a passenger ship
Machen, Walter (1915-1967)
Rain on the Wind. MacMillan, 1950. 312 pages
The lives of a group of Irish fishing families
Mack, William P. (1915-2003)
WWII Destroyer series:
South to Java. Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1987. 460 pages
Co-author William P. Mack Jr. Four-piper O'LEARY starts the Pacific war in the Asiatic Fleet stationed in Manila. With a suicidal captain, and a disgruntled Lieutenant Fraser, it must weather the initial Japanese onslaught against the Philippines and Dutch Indonesia. Nov. '41 - Mar '42.
Pursuit of the Seawolf. Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1991. 417 pages
O'LEARY, following refit, is transferred to the Atlantic, less Fraser, Arkwright, and the doctor. Meridith is CO, a rich Texan, Tex Sorenson, becomes Exec. Takes O'LEARY through the worst stages of the Battle of the Atlantic, until she is sunk in a duel with a German Seawolf sub. May '42 - Nov '43.
Checkfire! Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1992. 411 pages
WW I vintage destroyer becomes amphibious transport in the Pacific during WW II.
New Guinea: A Novel of War at Sea. Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1993. 430 pages
Sorenson, now qualified for command takes charge of USS CARSON, a SIMS class destroyer. With other survivors of the O'LEARY, the current XO of the CARSON, and an ex-naval aviator, Auerbach, he commands the ship during operations off New Guinea, the Admiralties, and a fictional invasion of Morotai, supporting McArthur's advance. Nov 1943 -- Sep 44
Straits of Messina. Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1994. 355 pages
Introduces the BENSON-class DD LAWRENCE, with a new cast of characters, as it provides escort services and offshore support to the Anglo-American invasions of Sicily and Salerno. One or two O'LEARY alumni are aboard in supporting roles, and the O'LEARY makes a cameo appearance. Major new characters are "Horse" Phelps, commodore of DesDiv 32, Pete Fannon, XO, and "Beetle" Bronson, communications officer.
Normandy. Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1995. 253 pages
Takes LAWRENCE from pre-D-Day build-up, through the invasion of Southern France. Phelps is still commodore, but Fannon is the LAWRENCE's captain, Bronson is XO. Book ends with "Beetle" Bronson taking command of the GRAYSON, another destroyer in the flotilla.
Matthew Christopher series:
Lieutenant Christopher : a novel of the Sea. Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1998. 316 pages
Tells the story of a young privateer who joins the Commercial Navy out of a sense of duty, and is recruited by Commodore John Paul Jones, after which he finds himself a participant in the famous raid on Whitehaven and the battle with HMS Seraphis.
Christopher and the Quasi-War with France. Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 2002. 217 pages
Tells the story of a shipbuilding familys problems when ship's captain Matthew Christopher and his crew aboard one of his family's newest ships, the Mary, are abruptly drafted to ward off the French while trading in the Caribbean.
Fergus Kilburnie series:
Captain Kilburnie. Naval Institute Press, 1999. 367 pages
This novel charts the rise through the ranks of Nelson's navy by Fergus Kilburnie, one of the first Scotsmen to serve as an officer. With the bold pluck of a natural-born leader, an innate affinity for the sea, and not a little help from friends in high places, the intrepid Kilburnie escapes one predicament after another to earn in just a few years a captain's stripes and the plum of the fleet, a three-masted frigate to fight France and Spain for command of the seas. In addition to French and Spanish foes, Kilburnie battles dangerous and unpredictable seas, envious crewmen, jealous fellow officers, and his own powder-keg emotions.
Commodore Kilburnie. Naval Institute Press, 2002. 209 pages
Scotsman Fergus Kilburnie returns to Nelson's Navy to do battle with England's enemies.
Mackenzie, Compton (1883-1972)
Whisky Galore. Chatto & Windus, 1947. 264 pages
During World War II, a cargo vessel is wrecked off a remote Scottish island group — Great Todday and Little Todday — with fifty thousand cases of whisky aboard. Due to wartime rationing, the thirsty islanders had nearly run out of the "water of life" and see this as an unexpected godsend. They manage to salvage several hundred cases before the ship sinks. But they must thwart the efforts of the authorities to confiscate the liquor, particularly in the shape of a pompous English Home Guard Captain.
Maclennan, Hugh (1907-1990)
Barometer Rising. Duell, Sloan and Pearch, 1941. 326 pages
Life in Halifax in the week before the 1917 munitions explosion.
Macomber, Robert N.
Honor (Peter Wake) series:
At the Edge of Honor. Pineapple Press, 2002. 280 pages
The Civil War is leaving its bloody trail across the nation as Peter Wake, born and bred in the North, joins the U.S. Navy and arrives in Florida for duty with the East Gulf Blockading Squadron. Assigned to the Rosalie, a tiny, armed sloop, Captain Wake commands a group of seasoned seamen on a series of voyages to seek and arrest Confederate blockade- runners and sympathizers, first in Florida's coastal waters, then in a dirty and corrupt Havana, and finally near the remote out-islands of the Bahamas.
Point of Honor. Pineapple Press, 2003. 327 pages
Wake, assisted by his indomitable Irish bosun, Sean Rork, commands a larger ship, the naval schooner St. James. Wake's remarkable ability to make things happen continues as he searches for army deserters in the Dry Tortugas, discovers an old nemesis during a stand off with the French Navy on the coast of Mexico, starts a drunken tavern riot in Key West, and confronts incompetent Federal army officers during an invasion of upper Florida. It all adds to his growing reputation in the fleet as a man who engenders loyalty among the sailors of the lower deck and grudging respect from his superiors.
Honorable Mention. Pineapple Press, 2004. 327 pages
Now in command of the steamer USS. Hunt, Lt. Peter Wake quickly plunges into action, chasing a strange vessel during a tropical storm off Cuba, dealing with a seductively dangerous woman during a mission in enemy territory ashore, confronting death to liberate an escaping slave ship, and coming face to face with the enemy's most powerful ocean warship in Havana's harbor.
A Dishonorable Few. Pineapple Press, 2005. 358 pages
The United States is painfully recovering from the Civil War, and Lt. Peter Wake heads to turbulent Central America to deal with a former American naval officer turned renegade mercenary. Wake discovers that no one trusts anyone in that deadly part of the world-with good reason. As the action unfolds in Colombia and Panama he realizes that his most dangerous adversary may be a man on his own ship, forcing him to make a decision that will lead to his court-martial in Washington when the mission has finally ended.
An Affair of Honor. Pineapple Press, 2006. 366 pages
Lieutenant Peter Wake is the executive officer of the USS Omaha on dreary patrol in the West Indies. Lonely for his family, he is looking forward to returning home to Pensacola in a few months and rekindling his troubled marriage with Linda. But fate has other plans for Wake. He runs afoul of the Royal Navy in Antigua and a beautiful French woman enters his life in Martinique. Then he's suddenly sent off on staff assignment to Europe, where he is soon immersed in the cynical swirl of Old World politics.
A Different Kind of Honor. Pineapple Press, 2007. 392 pages
Lt. Cmdr. Peter Wake, U.S.N., is on special assignment as the official American neutral naval observer to the War of the Pacific raging along the west coast of South America. Chile, having invaded Bolivia, has gone on to overrun Peru and controls the entire southeastern Pacific region. Washington, concerned over European involvement in the war and the French effort to build a canal through Panama, has sent Wake to observe local events. During Wake's dangerous mission--as naval observer, diplomat, and spy--he will witness history's first battle between ocean-going ironclads, ride the world's first deep-diving submarine, face his first machine guns in combat, advise the French trying to build the Panama Canal, and run for his life in the Catacombs of the Dead in Lima, Peru.
The Honored Dead. Pineapple Press, 2009. 400 pages
Amidst exotic beauty and palace intrigue in 1883 French Indochina, U.S. naval intelligence officer Peter Wake is thrust into international events.
The Darkest Shade of Honor. Pineapple Press, 2010. 404 pages
Commander Peter Wake, of the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, at New York City in 1886, where he meets two intense young men who will dramatically influence his life: Theodore Roosevelt and José Martí. Presented with a secret coded message, he deciphers it for Roosevelt, and soon wishes he hadn't. Returning to Washington, he is assigned to follow up on the secret message and uncover the extent of Cuban revolutionary activities between Florida and Cuba, along with investigating rumors of Spanish government agents operating in Key West.
Honor Bound. Pineapple Press, 2011. 366 pages
Cmdr. Peter Wake, U.S. naval intelligence agent, is in Florida culminating an espionage mission to learn Spain's naval readiness in Cuba. A woman from his past shows up, begging him to find her missing son, and Wake sets off across Florida, through the Bahamian islands, and deep into the dank jungles of Haiti. His band includes a Smithsonian ethnologist, a Bahamian Seminole sailor, Russian spies, and a Polish-Haitian soldier. Overcoming storms, mutiny, and shipwreck, Wake discovers the hidden lair of an anarchist group planning to wreak havoc around the world--unless he stops it.
Honorable Lies. Pineapple Press, 2012. 400 pages
Commander Peter Wake, Office of Naval Intelligence, has been ordered to salvage his failed espionage operation against the Spanish Navy in Havana. His network of spies in the city is compromised, international political tensions are escalating, the U.S. presidential election is looming, and Wake has five days to locate and rescue two of his network who are missing and assumed captured by the Spanish. Wake immediately realizes that his old nemesis Colonel Isidro Marrón, head of the dreaded Spanish counter- intelligence service, has set the perfect trap to kill him. Wake’s covert American team of experts in linguistics, chemistry, and lock picking, are soon hard pressed to just stay alive as they struggle to carry out his hastily conceived plan.
Honors Rendered. Pineapple Press, 2013. 357 pages
Commander Peter Wake, Office of Naval Intelligence, has been given an impossible assignment by President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland doesn't want a war to be the legacy of his first term in office. Wake is ordered to get to Samoa and clandestinely accomplish one of two things: somehow prevent war from breaking out, or win it decisively at the outset to prevent it from spreading around the globe. Enlisting the help of an unlikely team found along the way — a Hawaiian artillery officer, a renegade Methodist minister, and a beautiful shyster — Wake is led into situations he never anticipated, for the South Pacific is a very dangerous place indeed. And in the end, he faces a foe more daunting than any before in his life.
The Assassin's Honor. Pineapple Press, 2015. 400 pages
In 1892 Commander Peter Wake has left the world of espionage behind and is back in the sea-going navy. But duty has called him from his new Spanish lover back to Key West to investigate an assassination and prevent another one—all of which leads him to old German foes in Mexico as well as Spanish ones in Cuba and Tampa. The life of the great patriot of Cuba, José Martí, is at stake
An Honorable War: the Spanish-American War Begins. Pineapple Press, 2017. 373 pages
Politics, love, and war swirl around Captain Peter Wake (USN) in Havana when the USS Maine explodes on a quiet evening in February, 1898. Working with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt in the tense pre-war days, carrying out a perilous espionage mission inside Cuba, and leading a disastrous raid on the Cuban coast, Wake is in the middle of it all. This is the first of a dynamic trilogy set during the Spanish-American War in the Caribbean, when America changes forever into a global power.
Honoring the Enemy. Naval Institute Press, 2019. 368 pages
Capt. Peter Wake, USN, is a veteran of Office of Naval Intelligence operations inside Spanish-occupied Cuba, who describes with vivid detail his experiences as a naval liaison ashore with the Cuban and U.S. armies in the jungles, hospitals, headquarters, and battlefields in the 1898 campaign to capture Santiago de Cuba from the Spanish. His younger friend, and former superior, Theodore Roosevelt, is included in Wake's story, as the two of them endure the hell of war in the tropics.
Word of Honor. Naval Institute Press, 2020. 344 pages
It is three years after the Spanish-American War, and Wake is called in to explain his decisions and actions in the Caribbean during the wartime summer of 1898; when American sailors, Marines, and soldiers landed in eastern Cuba before Puerto Rico. As he briefs his interrogators, Wake recalls surviving two major land battles and a climatic sea battle near Cuba, then taking command of auxiliary cruiser Dixon, which is manned with regular and reservist officers and men. Wake soon tackles enemy blockade-runners, participates in the invasion of Puerto Rico, encounters war hero and future president Theodore Roosevelt, and pursues an elusive Spanish ocean raider on the loose somewhere in the Caribbean.
Code of Honor. Naval Institute Press, 2022. 352 pages
On a hot June day in 1904, the Russo-Japanese War is raging in Korea and Rear Admiral Peter Wake, forty-year veteran of naval espionage, ship combat, and guerilla wars, is in his White House office as special assistant to President Theodore Roosevelt. The Perdicaris Hostage Crisis in Morocco has diverted Wake from his critical main project: obtaining Imperial Germany’s 1903 revised invasion plans against the United States. After defusing the hostage mess, Wake and his unique team head for Hamburg and St. Petersburg in grand style on a diplomatic mission. But that’s merely a façade for the false-flag operation to get those German plans. Even as Wake hobnobs with Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II, he reconnects with contacts in the sordid world of intelligence. In a perilous evening in St. Petersburg, Wake is trapped by the dreaded Russian Okhrana into joining the Russian fleet as a neutral observer on their 18,000-mile voyage around the world to engage the vastly superior Japanese fleet—a certain death sentence.
Full Naval Honors : The Final Novel of Peter Wake and His Descendants. Naval Institute Press, 2023. 320 pages
This final volume finds the admiral dealing with European and Japanese spies and assassins in the Pacific while on a “diplomatic” recon mission ahead of the Great White Fleet’s epic 1907-09 voyage around the world. The action continues at the beginning of World War I, as Wake clashes with a German espionage network in the Central American jungle. Following that war, readers will learn the poignant story of Peter Wake's final years in Key West with his beloved Maria.