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1983 novel by Patrick O'Brian

Treason's Harbour is the ninth historical novel in the Aubrey Maturin series by British author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1983. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars. While with Captain Jack Aubrey awaiting repairs on his ship in Malta, Stephen Maturin discovers that the island is home to a ruthless network of French spies. An unwilling French informer needs help from Maturin, who discovers her predicament and helps her. Meanwhile, a new Admiral arrives at Malta. He sends Aubrey on three missions across the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, one on borrowed ships, and two of the missions are traps. Aubrey escapes the predicaments, but Admiral Harte dies when his ship of the line is destroyed in an ambush. The high level double agent whose existence Maturin begins to suspect does not succeed in undoing either Maturin or Aubrey, yet. After the reissue of the novel in 1992, it received strong praise. In mentioning the dramatic fate of Mr Hairabedian, one reviewer wryly states that nothing happens in the novel, but the novels are "filled with real people doing real things, brilliantly imagined and conveyed in crisp, clear, strong writing.") 2 Henry VI, a speech by Suffolk.

Publishers Weekly, reviewing an inadequate audio book narrator, commends the series in the highest terms, and is sharply critical of the narrator's inability to properly convey the main characters. They said of the series and the novel "what is certainly the greatest series about the British Navy ever written indeed, one of the most successful of its magnitude ever written in any genre". Of the reader of this audio book, they said "Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actor Pigott Smith has an appropriately English accent, but his characters' voices lack consistency and sensitivity to the subtleties of O'Brian's pen. ", a rather sharp criticism.

Most of the novels in the series tell the story exclusively from the point of view of Maturin or Aubrey, either through descriptions through their eyes, direct conversations, their internal thoughts, or their letters and diary entries. In essence, the reader usually knows only what one or both of the two main characters know. In Treason’s Harbour, however, O'Brian tells some of the story through conversations between the French agent Lesueur and Andrew Wray or other confederates in Malta, conversations that the protagonists neither hear nor overhear. Thus from the opening pages of the novel, the reader is aware that Wray, the acting second secretary of the British Admiralty, is secretly accepting money and taking orders from France. When Aubrey's mission to the Red Sea is a total failure, and again when Aubrey, Maturin, and Admiral Harte are sent on a suicide mission to the Barbary Coast, Aubrey begins to quietly doubt his luck, but the reader knows that he has been a victim of Wray's plots. As the plot unfolds, Maturin gradually realizes that there must be a traitor in the upper echelons of the British Admiralty. But again unlike the reader, he does not know the traitor's identity as the novel comes to a close. In fact, one of his last actions in the book is to write a letter to Wray detailing his suspicions and describing the French spy network in Malta.