Lion Hearts by Dan Jones

Lion Hearts

By Dan Jones

Viking 2025

The Great Stations of Bro-Lit are three, and these are their nature: First, there’s “Brotherhood Forged in War.” Then there’s “Sully Betrayed Us.” And finally there’s “We’re Getting the Band Back Together.” There can be variations; some of the more daring Bro-Lit authors will stretch each Great Station out to two or even three books apiece, others manage to cram all three into one single volume. But no Great Station can ever be skipped or skimped.

On some level, historian and now bestselling novelist Dan Jones must understand this, and he’s delivered it perfectly in his “Essex Dogs” trilogy, which is now completed with Lion Hearts. In his trilogy, Jones neatly adhered to the liturgy: the first book, Essex Dogs, was our boys, English mercenaries under the leadership of a man named Loveday, storming the French beaches and being forged in war. The second book, Wolves of Winter, had many moving parts (more on that shortly), the foremost of which was when Sully (the name always changes) betrayed his old comrades. And in Lion Hearts, as much of the band as possible gets back together or one last grueling campaign of fighting and f-bombs.

The book opens in 1350, two years after the Dogs have disbanded, with one ascending to the plush luxuries of King Edward’s Court, others drifting elsewhere, and Loveday himself running a tavern in Winchelsea even though it’s obvious to literally everybody that he’s a barely-retired professional killer. At one point he talks with one of the King’s sergeant-at-arms about all the violence that seems so far away from his beloved Green Lion Tavern, and the man abruptly tells him to show his hands:

Loveday was taken aback by the bluntness of the request, but there was something compelling in the stranger’s manner that made it seem both impolite and even dangerous to refuse. He put out his palms. The man just looked at them and smoothed his own hand over his chin. ‘No, you’re no roofer,’ he said. ‘And you’re no sailor, either. But I should say you’ve been aboard ships. Maybe jumped off them, aiming to slice a few Frenchmen’s bollocks off.’

‘Aye,’ said Loveday. ‘Once or twice.’

He naively thinks all that is now behind him, but there are forces at work on the international stage. Two years prior, King Edward sent his daughter Joan to marry into the kingdom of Castille, which was at the time teeming with the Black Death. Poor Joan had promptly sickened and died, and the plague had then swept through Edward’s England, which even now, years later, is still staggering under the mental and spiritual impact of all that dying. All our speaking characters this time around have been scarred by the plague, which Jones has them discuss in resolutely modern language:

“How did the king take it?”

‘What sort of question is that?’ Sir Stephen was snappish again, yet, again, he relented. ‘His little girl was dead. His favourite. And then the Death came and killed half the rest of his subjects too. He was pissed off. And I imagine he still is.”

As all these tensions mount, forces pull many of the Dogs back into each other’s company, even though … you guessed it … they’re getting too old for this. Jones is brutally frank about the decline his main hero has undergone by tending bar instead of cracking heads:

Loveday was not the quickest or the most agile of men – he never had been, and his years of decline had done nothing for his speed nor his grace of movement. But he had been in streets like this all his life. There was a lot of him: with his round gut and his mass of dense, squat muscle build for nearly half a century, he reckoned his was as heavy as a fatted calf.

Anyone familiar with the Great Stations will be able to predict not only every single thing that happens in Lion Hearts but also great swatches of actual dialogue, but at this point it hardly matters. For half a dozen blazingly kinetic scenes, the band is back together.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News