Having been restored to his position as Naval captain, Aubrey's sent off to the South China Sea, ferrying a persnickety diplomat in order to secure a treaty. Maturin's along for the ride, with his own instructions for intelligence work. While it's generally interesting, the high point for me was the latter's excursion to a temple, where he was able to indulge his interest in natural history... observing orangutans, and that sort of thing. That was a genuinely enjoyable hiatus, of sorts, within the rest of the novel, which in pretty much every other respect was rather slow. I don't know if this volume, number thirteen as I recall, has the least appealing pacing in the series thus far, but if it doesn't it's close to it. It felt very slow, especially in comparison to the past couple of books in the series.

Fox, the ferried-about diplomat, is an interesting side character though. He's not especially likeable, and indeed he manages to put off pretty much every character who has the misfortune to spend time with him. Nonetheless, he's still competent, if potentially a little unstable and completely tone-deaf to how he comes across to the people he considers underlings. The ending's somewhat ambiguous regarding him - I don't know if I'd be sorry if he died at sea or not. As irritating as he is, he did seem to give a small jolt to the plot, and the pacing, whenever he appeared, and maybe that's reason enough to keep him around for a bit.