CHINA SEA
by David Poyer
China Sea ($24.95; Feb.; 352 pp.; 0-312-20287-3): In the sixth installment of Poyer's popular Tales of the Modern Navy
series, midwestern straight-arrow (and Annapolis grad) Dan Lenson has attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and assigned the task of delivering the physically damaged battleship Gaddis to Pakistan, as a "donation" to its defense forces. Or so Lenson is told—before a change of orders sends him and his crew into the China Sea to engage pirates wreaking havoc against both commercial and refugee transport vessels. Still darker forces are at work, too, in a busy narrative that stretches to include Lenson's onshore relationship with his sometime girlfriend Blair Titus, problems with subordinates who "range from disgruntled to barely this side of mutinous" (one of them probably a serial killer of women), a hurricane, and a court-martial at sea. By the time Lenson thinks to himself "This skull-and-crossbones stuff was a high-risk occupation," the reader is too exhausted to
disagree. Poyer's fans will love it; others may prefer to reread Patrick O'Brian.