After near disaster on board a canal barge, Horatio Hornblower is given his first assignment as Captain, taking charge of the Atropos. Soon the Atropos is part of the Mediterranean fleet's assault upon Napoleon, and Captain Hornblower must execute a bold and daring salvage operation for buried treasure lying deep in Turk waters.

It is May, 1810 - and thirty-nine-year-old Captain, Horatio Hornblower has been handed his first ship of the line. Though the seventy-four-gun HMS Sutherland is 'the ugliest and least desirable two-decker in the Navy', Hornblower knows that by the time Sutherland and her squadron reach the blockaded Catalonian coast, every seaman will do his duty.

Plan Aurora, hatched in a remote dacha in the forest outside Moscow, involves an act of murderous destruction designed to tumble Britain into revolution. A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English town, begins to assemble a jigsaw of devastation.

Dr No, a sinister recluse with mechanical pincers for hands and a sadistic fascination with pain, holds James Bond firmly in his steely grasp. Bond and Honey Rider, his beautiful girl Friday, have been captured trespassing on Dr No's secluded Caribbean island. Soon, they are fighting for their lives in a murderous game of Dr No's choosing.

Auric Goldfinger is the kind of man Bond loves to hate: cruel, clever, frustratingly careful - a cheat and a crook. So Bond relishes his mission to discover what this man - the richest in the country - intends to do with his ill-gotten gains, and what his connection is with SMERSH, the feared Soviet spy-killing corps.