Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser was famed for his legendary Flashman series, featuring the incorrigible knave Harry Flashman, a soldier in the imperial British army. In the colorful standalone Captain in Calico, the first novel he ever wrote but which has never been published, Fraser introduces another real-life anti-hero: Captain John Rackham, called Calico Jack, an illustrious eighteenth-century pirate who marauded the Caribbean seas. On a tranquil evening in the Bahamas, Calico Jack, long wanted on counts of piracy, makes a surprise appearance at the Governors residence and asks for a pardon for himself and his men. A deal is brokered after Jack reveals the motive for turning himself in: love. When Jack last set sail from the Bahamas two years ago, he left behind a beautiful fiance acute, and he recently learned that she remains unmarried. What the governor does not reveal to Jack is that while he was off pirating, his beloved has become betrothed to a new man the governor himself. It doesn't take long for this truth to come to light, and after embarking on a new romance with famous Irish pirate Anne Bonney, Jack is quickly transformed back into a thieving captain in calico.

"A remarkably successful book on a fascinating subject, well organized and well written." ?Time's Literary Supplement

From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, outlaws reigned supreme on the contentious frontier between England and Scotland. Feud and terror, raid and reprisal were the ordinary stuff of life?and a way of survival. Power was held by the notorious border reivers (the ?steel bonnets,” named for their flashy helmets), clan-loyal raiders, freebooters, plunderers, and rustlers who robbed and murdered in the name of family: the famous clans?like Elliot, Armstrong, Charlton, and Robson?romanticized by Sir Walter Scott. They were the last opponents to the Acts of Union of 1707, and fought fiercely and fancifully to the end.

In The Steel Bonnets, George MacDonald Fraser, author of the bestselling Flashman novels and himself a borderer, takes us back through three centuries of conflict, telling the fascinating and bloody story of the reivers. He relates their rise to power as ferocious soldiers on horseback, their important roles in the battles at Flodden and Solway Moss, and their surprisingly sudden fall from grace. The Steel Bonnets is a superb work of serious history and scholarship that is as irresistibly compelling as any novel.