This is the first book in the series that I found to be a little disappointing. The beginning, where Stephan meets his autistic daughter and deals with yet another disappearance of his wife, Diana, was compelling. But the whole trip to Africa, which could have filled several volumes, was handled so quickly that it seemed forced. O'Brian rushes through the slave trade, the geography, the flora and fauna and Stephan's bout of yellow fever so fast that I got little sense of time or place. The final section, on the defeat of the French squadron that was invading Ireland ended so simply that it involved almost no suspense. It wasn't a bad book by anyone else's standards, but for O'Brian, it was a let-down.