Corsair is the first book in the Pirate series and follows the fate of Hector Lynch, a young man who finds himself snatched from an Irish village by Barbary corsairs. seventeen-year-old Hector is sold at auction in Algiers. Befriended by fellow captive Dan, a Miskito Indian from the Caribbean he must learn how to negotiate a bewildering world where  life is cheap and only the quick witted survive.

To escape the horrors of the slave barracks, the two friends convert to Islam and, serving aboard a Turkish ship, their vessel is sunk at sea. By a savage twist of fortune, they are condemned to another slavery, this time for Christians masters when they are chained next to vagabonds and convicts on the oar bench of a French galley.

Throughout his ordeal Hector is driven by the need to find what happened to his sister, kidnapped by the corsairs, and he learns the chilling truth when he and his colourful band of brothers are shipwrecked on the coast of Morocco …