American hero Commander Bliven Putnam returns to the sea to meet the deadliest threat to the United States since the Revolution.

At the opening of the War of 1812, the British control the most powerful navy on earth, and Americans are again victims of piracy. Bliven Putnam, late of the Barbary War, is dispatched to Charleston to outfit and take command of a new twenty-gun brig, the USS Tempest.

Prowling the South Atlantic in the Tempest, Bliven takes prizes and disrupts British merchant shipping, until he is overhauled, overmatched, and disastrously defeated by the frigate HMS Java. Taken aboard, he finds he recognizes two familiar faces from Naples: the Java's captain, Lord Arthur Kington, and his old friend, Sam Bandy, who has been pressed into British Service. As Bliven and Sam plan to foment mutiny among the captive crewmen, they cannot possibly know that another American ship looms over the horizon or that one of the most famous battles of the War of 1812 is about to begin. With exquisite detail and guns-blazing action, A Darker Sea illuminates an unforgettable period in American history.