This was easily the worse and most boring out of all the Sharpe books in the series so far. Cornwell has this unique ability to write a very interesting, compelling first chapter and then have the rest of the book devolve until the reader is grateful to get to the end because it means it's finally over.

Sharpe has a great introductory chapter where he works to get back at a man who stole from him and countless other people. Then, he boards a ship and absolutely nothing proceeds to happen for over two hundred pages. Some people have said this was more of a romance book because of the relationship between him and Grace but I would argue against that because there is no romantic scenes or character development, just insta-love and then fucking. I genuinely do not understand why Sharpe and Grace are together. Sharpe is in love with Grace because she is beautiful and that's it, and Grace loves Sharpe because...he's the main character of this story, I guess? I found it incredibly hard to care about Grace at all because all the women in this series seem to have Bond Girl Syndrome in which they stick around for one book then mysteriously disappear in the next one, never to be seen or heard of again.

I'm not sure why I didn't just DNF this one because I just skimmed the last third of this book, I was so bored and did not care about what was happening. The stakes in this book are ridiculously low. Every character is incredibly boring and unnecessary. If I didn't already own quite a few of the next books in this series, this book absolutely would make me stop reading the series because it was so bad. I'm hoping the next book is an improvement because being stuck on a ship with a single POV as compared to traveling around and getting multiple POVs like in the previous books definitely worked against this one.