A fresh take on historical fiction

James Vella-Bardon:The Sheriff's Catch Unbound, 2018
Within the first few pages of James Vella-Bardon's novel, the reader is served with combat scenes, house burnings and a quest for revenge.
The year is 1585 and the initial setting is the Spanish-occupied Netherlands, where a rebellion is being brutally suppressed.
Needless to say, the Spanish soldiers are very unpopular with the Dutch natives. There is one exception, and that is Abel de Santiago, a deadly sniper who does not fully share his comrades' violent tendencies. To make matters more complicated he is married to a Dutch woman. On the day his wife's house is burnt down with her inside it, Abel makes it his life's mission to track down the killers.
If you had the misconception that a historical novel is stuffed with facts and details, then Vella-Bardon takes that trope and turns it into something completely different. The reader is, instead, hurled into a rollercoaster ride of a novel with interesting plot developments.

As Abel's quest for revenge materialises, he is captured and sold as a galley slave, finding himself aboard one of the ships forming part of the Spanish Armada. As popular history goes we all know how...

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