This scheme has flair! This scheme is Napoleonic!' roars Flynn Patrick O'Flynn, with characteristic enthusiasm. The year is 1912. The place East Africa. The action – ivory-poaching deep in the German-occupied delta of the steaming Rufiji river.

But Flynn, elephant-hunter and hounder of Germans, likes to enjoy the spoils of his sport without too much effort and the arrival of rich young Sebastian Oldsmith is a windfall he cannot resist.

Before he can gather his fuddled wits, Sebastian is plunged not merely into an ivory-hunt but a murderous game of hide-and-seek with Flynn's outraged and much-taunted enemy, the gross, sausage-eating German Commissioner, Herman Fleischer.

Bruce Curry is the leader of a mercenary band with the dubious support of three white officers. His mission is to relieve a mining town cut off by the fighting and to retrieve a priceless consignment of diamonds. Ranged against his ill-disciplined unit are bandits, guerrillas and hostile tribes that infest the land. But there is another, even deadlier enemy -- one of his own men...

The Van Der Byl Diamond Company, willed by its founder to his son Benedict, daughter Tracey and estranged foster-child Johnny Lance, turns out to be a bequest not of love, but of hatred. For it is couched in such terms as to offer Benedict an instrument of destruction of his bitterest rival. 'Destroy Johnny' was the old man's implacable message to his son, and, obsessively jealous of his foster-brother, Benedict sets out in ruthless pursuit of this goal.

It is 1667 and the mighty naval war between the Dutch and the English still rages. Sir Francis Courteney and his son Hal, in their fighting caravel, are on patrol off Southern Africa, lying in wait for a galleon of the Dutch East India Company returning from the Orient laden with spices, timber and gold.

From the very first pages, Wilbur Smith spins a colourful and exciting tale, crackling with tension and drama, that builds to a stunning climax.

Packed with vivid descriptive passages of the open seas, and an extraordinary cast of characters, Birds of Prey is a masterpiece from a storyteller at the height of his powers.

For Harry Fletcher, life on St Mary's Island is good. He has a fine boat and a long list of rich clients eager to charter it for the big game fishing of the Mozambique Channel. He has a home amongst the palms above a white coral beach, and he has friends and pretty girls to share his paradise.

Harry has earned all this the hard way, but now he is at peace. Until suddenly men from the world of violence which he has forsaken so long before arrive on the island to plunge him once more into a deadly game – for an unknown prize against undeclared odds. Of one thing Harry is certain: to fall is to die.