The Golden Hawk

New York: The Dial Press. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. 1948. First Edition. Hardcover. [top front corner slightly bumped, one-time owner's name and date written at top of front endpaper; jacket shows just a bit of wear at extremities, tiny surface scrape at both ends of spine, itsy-bitsy paper loss at top rear hinge]. (endpaper maps) This "pulsating novel of adventure, revenge and exotic love in the West Indies of the seventeenth century, when the might of imperial Spain was making its last great stand to retain its conquests in the New World" tells the story of Kit Gerado's "lifelong search for the revenge on Don Luis del Toro, the Spanish grandee who had killed his mother and touched his life with unspeakable horror. It was a search that was to take Kit from the Old World to the New, from the buccaneer harbors of Sainte Domingue, Porto Bello and Cul-de-Sac to the gray, grim-walled city of Cartagena in Spanish South America." (I wonder if, when he finally catches up with Don Luis, he delivers the line: "My name is Kit Gerado. You killed my mother. Prepare to die.") This was Yerby's third novel, and the second of his books to be made into a movie (with the same title); released by Columbia Pictures in 1952, it starred Sterling Hayden and Rhonda Fleming. .