Perhaps that improbable mix arises because our hero, the peripatetic Englishman William Burr, who has been inveigled away from hunting pirates in British Honduras to track down a renegade convict with messianic delusions in Van Diemen’s Land, keeps bouncing back from injuries that might have dispatched lesser men. Twice within the first forty pages we find him opening his eyes, after being skewered by pirates or bushrangers, to behold one of the novel’s array of kindly supporting characters ministering to his wounds. The tendency to sink into romantic fantasy may derive from the love-at-first-sight quality of Burr’s relationship with Ellen Vaughan, a gentlewoman oppressed by her dastardly husband, a corrupt colonial magistrate. Infamy offers almost as much lurid sex as it does derring-do, but the lust is often so coyly sugar-frosted as to make this novel a contender for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. A sample: ‘At the very last moment, Charles Trentham withdrew his cock from Tilly Holt’s tight sweetness. Her thick, pale thighs were slicked wet, her moist black bush pasted flat. The woman was a geyser.’