Time has once again jumped forward several years since the previous book in James L. Haley's ongoing series about the fledgling United States Navy in its formative years. The first book, The Shores of Tripoli, is set during the First Barbary War in the early 1800s, while the second, A Darker Sea, takes place during the War of 1812.

The Devil in Paradise begins in 1817, with Captain Bliven Putnam nearing the end of a cruise against pirates and slavers in the Caribbean. He has his own ship, the American sloop of war Rappahannock, and he is understandably proud of his first command. But he's also looking forward to spending time home with his wife Clarity and his elderly parents in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he is building quite a nice life for himself.

He is disappointed, to say the least, to learn upon his return home that he will only get a few months' hiatus before being deployed again -- and this time, his destination is the far side of the world. Putnam's mission to the Pacific will take him away from his home and family for two years or more. Coincidentally, Clarity has an opportunity to join a band of missionaries to the Sandwich Islands (aka Hawaii), which will serve as Putnam's home port for the duration of his mission.

Unfortunately, her voyage and her experiences in the Sandwich Islands come to dominate the book, relegating Bliven to a minor character. While some readers will find her observations on those formative years in what would eventually become the nation's 50th state to be fascinating, it's not the book I was expecting, and I found much of it quite dull. Be prepared for a great deal of information on the politics and strife among various communities in the islands, as well as ample discourse on the downside of Hawaii's native religions vs. the merits of Christianity.

The book, for instance, provides a much more thorough description of Clarity's voyage around Cape Horn with her missionaries than it does Bliven's voyage on his sloop. Her interactions with the native queen is given more attention than his voyages to far destinations such as China and Singapore. His encounter with pirates is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it experience.

The primary antagonist, if a character who appears so infrequently can be so labeled, is a villainous American trader who receives his comeuppance offscreen, as it were, with Putnam's involvement limited to an act of deceit. The book has no true denouement, no great battle to conclude things; it just kind of ends, with Putnam sailing home having accomplished, in this reader's view, very little.

Haley also takes an unusual interest in disparaging the appearance of minor female characters, noting for instance that future author Harriet Beecher (who is a child under Clarity's tutelage and has not yet married into the Stowe family) "knew very well that she was not pretty, nor ever would be, a hard revelation for a girl of precocious intelligence but a fate she accepted with the stoicism of her father's faith." Jerusha Chamberlain, a newly married member of the band of missionaries, is "careworn though not unattractive," while Sybil Mosely, another of the missionaries, is "a lady of near-epic plainness, as homely, in fact, as if human features had been rendered on a large grape." Haley even goes so far as to opine that Sybil's willingness to travel into danger for her faith was all that earned her a particularly handsome husband: "There was no other conceivable circumstance in which a woman of her looks might land a man of his beauty," he writes, "except to cast her lot to this enterprise in which only a select few women were willing to risk their very lives."

While not a major aspect of the novel, the author's fixation on this point is distracting.

More distracting to me, personally, is the author's growing focus on religion. I picked up the book expecting sea battles, and found missionary work instead. After the fairly exciting narratives of the two previous books, this tale of Hawaii is comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps Haley felt this was a good way to put to use the research he did for his earlier nonfiction book, Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii.

There is one more -- and, to my knowledge, final -- book in the Bliven Putnam series. I am sure I will someday read Captain Putnam for the Republic of Texas, but his Hawaiian adventure has left me less interested in seeking it out.