I have spent many years enjoying the adventures of Ram Cat Lewrie. He is a no holds barred man of the times, perhaps one that would not sit well in a typical regency romance, and his sexual escapades taking him further than any other Age of Sail protagonist we have come to know.

That said, in this volume, we are let down a tad following the man. We are present at the battle of Copenhagen, yet it takes more than 80% of the book to get there. And the first half of the book is far more concerned with time on land than life aboard ship. Further, Lambdin seems to have taken every opportunity to use the dictionary of Cant from the times to inflect such into all the writing, which causes some switching back and forth between modern narration and then a faux period dialogue. Even with Russian translation as footnotes in the latter half.

As another reviewer points, out, the reader is also presented with what stands today on the site of a coffee house that Lewrie was visiting in the 18th century. A factoid that Lewrie wouldn't know but of course Lambdin certainly does.

Lewrie as a hero exists to have adventures and be a fighting captain, making an enemy or two, who are not particularly French, along the way, whilst being heroic on one hand and on the other getting further embroiled in trouble. A hero who if he had not found the sea would have no skills he could exploit and long since would have been skewered in a duel on land for little or no reason. That essence is what makes Lewrie a character with legs! Here, away for far too long from the sea, with a minor subplot that Lambdin wanted to develop, and loose ends from previous books to tie up, the saga looses its steam. So much so that I had to start this story 3 times before being able to push on to the end.

For fans of the series, but not a good place to start. ( )

Not much action, but it wrapped up a lot of earlier plot threads which had been dragging on and culminated in the Battle of Copenhagen, which is good. ( )

I look forward to each new book as this series appears and, as ever, The Baltic Gambit does not disappoint. Much of the action takes place ashore -- it is almost 200 pages before Lewrie gets a ship, and 300+ pages before a gun is fired in anger -- but I enjoyed reading about Lewrie's time in London. Lambdin provides this pleasure on several levels. One the one hand, Alan Lewrie continues to grow and mature. (Of course, he is pushing 40.) As the story moves through Lewrie's courtroom victory over the odious Beauman family, he actually begins to tire of nightly bacchanals and starts to rise early and read seriously about world affairs (providing the author with an excellent way to provide geo-political context to the modern reader.) While not entirely immune to feminine charms and entanglements, he eschews the damn-the-consequences rutting of his younger days. He even makes efforts to curb the most flagrant of his excesses in deference the the straight-laced, proto-Victorian abolitionists who sponsored his defense. On the other hand, Lambdin's confident mastery of place and time has the reader wide-eyed and avid every time Lewrie sets out from his lodgings. High and low, rich and poor, honest folk and scoundrels, King's English and rogues' cant -- we meet a colorful and varied set of characters at every turn.

On the final hand, we are treated to Lambdin's sly narratorial voice. The book is narrated from the conventionally strict third-person omniscient point of view. Except. Except, Chapter Six opens with these words: "The Admiral Boscawen Coffee House, at the corner of Oxford Street and Orchard Street (site of the present day Selfridge's)..." Wow! This sole explicit intrusion of the 21st Century into the book colors the whole story. It tells us that we must drop all pretense that perspective is limited to 1801. Suspend disbelief at your own risk, reader -- you have been warned that you'll need to be looking through two lenses at the same time: Alan Lewrie's from 1801 and Dewey Lambdin's puckish view from 2009. At one point, Lewrie muses about an abolitionist who cares nothing for the suffering of slaves because his sole object is to tear the United States apart. (After all, the North and South are sure to be at each other's throats if slavery is abolished.) I can almost hear that 21st Century narrator chortling over his own cleverness.

Once Lewrie gets his ship, the frigate Thermopylae, we settle with a happy sigh into enjoying Lambdin's peerless passages of ship handling and fighting. Lewrie's cruise in the Baltic is, like the best of his adventures, ambiguous. The naval mission is combined with a "diplomatic" task, arranged by his shadowy mentor, Zachariah Twigg. The story culminates with a fine fictional account of the Battle of Copenhagen, including Nelson famously turning the blind eye and a cameo appearance by William "Breadfruit" Bligh. As always, we are left wondering about several unresolved threads which Lambdin promises to take up in the next book, King, Ship, and Sword. ( )