Michael Aye

I'm afraid that this just isn't the book for me!
I have managed to read the other boks in this series - ("The Fighting Anthonys") 'The Reaper', 'HMS Seawolf'' and 'Barracuda'.but whether they're getting steadily worse, or I'm getting steadily intolerant of, amongst other things, the style, I don't know; but towards the end of the latest in the series - 'Seahorse' - I was becoming more an more irritated and looking forward to finishing it!
I should explain, that it was not entirely Michael Aye's fault, but certainly in my opinion he must carry the weight of my criticism. I bought the book on Kindle, and in my opinion something went wrong in transferring it from book form to Kindle form. On every page, almost without exception words were split by hyphens.much as they were in books for children learning to read - (Rupert Books come to mind) - these were not words at the end of lines, which normally occur occasionally in books, and are obviously quite acceptable. These were words anywhere on a page - there seems to be no pattern for their appearance, but some examples are mat-ter, per-fected, fin-ished, lieu-tenant, sarcasti-cally, sto-ries, wea-pons, to name but a few. As many as three to four examples per page. Surely it must be an electronic fault, no-one would do this on purpose, There was even one example of the same word being used twice in the same paragraph, but with different spellings - 'something' and 'some-thing'! But all very irritating!
Another problem which may be the fault iof the Kindle translation is that sometimes there are, for example only two words on a page - "shoved off", and a number of other examples of the same problem.
But to get to my non-Kindle problems, I remember picking up the first book in the series with eager anticipation, (I have read many series of books on the navy of Napoleonic times/Nelson's Navy, and hoped that this was the start of a whole new series, no such luck!
The first thing that I didn't like was the choice of surname for the leading characters - 'Anthony', it didn't seem to fit. It's like having two first names together, but,I can tolerate that. What I really found fault with was the fact that Mr. Aye or his publisher did not seem to have used the services of a proof reader. There are many spelling, and grammatical mistakes, (and I have taken into account the difference between English and American English), an example being the use of differential instead of deferential. American spelling examples are the use of 'maneuver' instead of 'manoeuvre' and 'tampions' rather than 'tompions'.
An item I query, just feeling that it's not correct is the use of "Yes sir, Captain" as opposed to "Yes sir" It sounds very American to me!
Overall, I find the stories very weak, compared with the masters of this genre, and very "American" comsidering that the books are based on the British Navy.… (mer)