The Wolves and the Greyhounds - Paperback

An entire fleet of German warships has mysteriously vanished, and the Royal Navy must find them-before it's too late.

At the outbreak of the First World War, a Royal Navy task force raced to the German colony at Tsingtao to surround and blockade enemy forces stationed there. They arrived to find the port completely empty. Somehow, all of the powerful warships of the feared German East Asia Squadron had steamed out into the vastness of the Pacific-and disappeared. As days turned into weeks, the possibility that the elusive German fleet might suddenly appear on any horizon paralyzed the British Empire and set in motion a frantic search for the enemy warships.

The fates of two naval commanders-one British, one German-are inexorably drawn together as the world plunges into war. John Luce, a veteran Royal Navy captain, must face the greatest challenge of his career as he leads a ragtag squadron of obsolete British warships into unfamiliar waters in search of the rogue enemy fleet. His darkest fears are realized, and the course of the war may hang in the balance. Captain Julius Maerker of the Kaiserliche Marine has assumed his new command with the East Asia Squadron. As war is declared, he finds himself serving in the shadow of a mercurial and fiery admiral, whose ambition will take the German fleet on an extraordinary odyssey and risk the lives of thousands of his men. In this epic wartime adventure, bold gambles and tragic miscalculations pull these two captains, their ships, and their rival empires into a desperate clash-culminating in the most decisive naval battles of the war. The Wolves and the Greyhounds brilliantly dramatizes a largely forgotten chapter of WWI that will captivate fans of historical fiction and military thrillers.