It's not often that I read a book about pirates but this one has a neat twist as it tells the tale of a woman who joined their ranks and was every bit as bold and bad as the rest of them. Set in the 1700s at the time of the Jacobite uprising, there is plenty of history to create an authentic feel and no sense of dressing things up to make pirate life more palatable. We meet Goody Brown as a young child at the start of the book and she has been adopted by the local doctor and his wife, which all sounds very respectable, but then the doctor also dabbles in smuggling and brings goods in from the sea via a set of underground tunnels that only he has the key for. The smugglers are a mean bunch and soon the story twists and turns to weave the good people in with the bad, and Goody becomes embroiled in the smuggling as she helps her father give access to the underground passages. After a while she is trusted with keeping the key and ends up taking the side of the smugglers a...