In The Mauritius Command, Jack Aubrey serves as the commodore for a squadron of ships trying to wrest a pair of islands in the Indian Ocean from the occupying French. Aubrey expresses ambivalence about the fact that he is overseeing the battles rather than fully participating in them, and as a reader I had a similar ambivalence about the battle scenes which didn't seem as vivid as in previous books. Partly that's due to Aubrey's position and partly it's due to the sheer number of different ships involved in the campaign. It wasn't always easy to keep track of them all.
As compensation for the weaker fight sequences, the book has interesting subsidiary characters in the captains serving under Aubrey. Captain Lord Clonfort and Captain Corbett were possibly painted a bit too broadly, but it was fascinating to see how their personalities affected their command styles, and how those command styles affected the functioning of their ships.
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