Any Approaching Enemy, by Jay Worrall

I read the first book in this series--”Sails on the Horizon”--a month or so ago and mostly enjoyed it. My criticism of it was that the main character, British naval officer Charles Edgemont, spent too much time in England wooing his soon-to-be-wife Penny and not enough time at sea fighting the enemy. The author wrote some great action scenes and, to be fair, Penny is a great character--strong-willed, smart and funny. But there was simply too much of her and not enough cannon fire.

This time, we pick up with Edgemont commanding a frigate in the Mediterranean Sea not long before the Battle of the Nile. So I figure that there will be lots of combat and minimum family drama. Exactly what a book like this should be.

EXCEPT Edgemont meets his wife when stopping in Naples. She’s been travelling around looking for him. She comes aboard the ship and is a regular character for most of the book.

But I didn’t mind. Edgemont spends much of the book sailing the Med, looking for either the French fleet or Admiral Nelson’s fleet. Along the way, he encounters and fights the occasional enemy ship. There are lots of scenes with Charles and Penny, but the overall pacing of the novel mixes this in more effectively with the action than in the previous novel. And, as I said, Penny is a strong character. As long as she’s not bringing the novel to a halt when we are hoping for another naval battle, she’s fun to hang out with.

And those naval battles are great. There’s a particularly intense boarding action in which there’s an unexpected death of a key character. Later on, despite commanding a relatively tiny ship compared to the big battleships, Edgemont plays a key role in the Battle of the Nile. It’s another intense and exciting action set piece.

One last fun detail. In the previous novel, the author acknowledged one of his influences by having Horatio Hornblower show up in a brief cameo. This time, Jack Aubrey puts in a brief appearance, pointing to the author’s other primary influence.