Vacation led me to take up Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series once more. I left off with Desolation Island, so next up was The Fortune of War, where Jack and Stephen start in England, lose their ship to fire east of Brazil, and are taken prisoners of war by the Americans (yes, it’s ~1812). Much of the tale is in Boston, a city struggling between some lingering loyalties to England and umbrage at the impressment of American sailors by the Royal Navy (one of the various reasons for the conflict). Trade and commerce have ground to a halt, which also adds to the ambivalence of the Bostonians. Aubrey and Maturin are, sequentially considered as spies, in part through the intervention of the French. Maturin, of course, is a spy, and after various urban actions, our heroes make their escape to a British ship blockading the harbor, with the aid of an American merchant. Not coincidentally, they bring out Diana Villiers, the long-time, capricious love of Stephen’s life. Villiers is one of the few female characters to get any true color in this series. She’s a bit of a high-flyer, and is not wholly sympathetic, which is all the more interesting. The book ends with a most honorable sea battle, where the British ship (amusingly named the Shannon) finally atones for the previous three losses to the American navy. This would be a harder book to pick up without foreknowledge of the characters, but most enjoyable to those already drawn in.