The Captain Must Die by Robert Colby is a vintage pulp revenge/suspense thriller, originally published as #835 in the Gold Medal line from Fawcett Publishing in 1959 and now free courtesy of Adams Media's Prologue Books e-reprint imprint.
Free @
B&N and
Amazon (available to Canadians and i
n the UK).
A version of this by a different publisher was included in Amazon's
big Prologue 99 cent sale last week instead of this particular edition, which remained full price, so you might want to check and return that if you bought it by accident.
I hope that Adams/Prologue continue to offer a new freebie in their reprint line every so often, though preferably ones I didn't buy during the sale, of which I scooped the lot, which probably jinxes it now and I'll learn over the course of the year that I could have saved $31.68 through sheer apathy and indifference.
Oh well, at least it was cheap and it's not like I was doing anything better with that money, 30% of which supports them in their quest to reprint vintage old school stuff for people who like vintage old school stuff (who are usually not me, but
pour encourager les autres and all that, although it's generally admirals who must die instead of captains in that scenario) and maybe they even offer some sci-fi/fantasy pulp freebies when they get around to reprinting those.
Besides, even at an estimated 1 freebie-ization per week it would take them 2 1/2 years to run through all the ones I'd bought by which time I'd sincerely hope I'd have read at least 32 of them. Preferably before they got offered free.
Description
For twelve long years they remembered. For twelve long years they plotted. And now Captain Driscoll was going to pay for what he had done to them during the war.
They weren’t going to kill him right away. First there would be only little things, irritating things, that would build and grow and tighten until Captain Driscoll became afraid. Then they’d begin their reign of terror. That would be the best part. The three revenge-hungry men would savor those moments like a good wine.
And when Captain Driscoll was a broken, sobbing man, when his sanity was almost gone, they would murder him.