Hornblower and the "Hotspur"

The Third Horatio Hornblower Tale of the Sea

By: C. S. Forester

Narrated by: Nicolas Coster

Length: 13 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's Summary

Napoleon is about to invade England, and it falls to young Horatio Hornblower to stop him.

This is the third in C. S. Forester's 11 volume series about one of the Royal Navy's most daring and resourceful officers.

©1962 C.S. Forester (P)2008, 2017 Phoenix Books

Do not buy this one

Terrible sound quality.
Narrator is forcefully loud with some characters and inaudibly soft with others. I returned the book because it was so disappointing

Pronunciation

Absolutely terrible pronunciation. I found it actually painful at times to listen to because the narrator has no clue how to pronounce sailing terms for the names of the ships.

Great book marred by terrible narrator

First of all, this is a great book. Another Forester classic. Despite the narration, I think it's still worth your time. The narrator is painfully slow and has strange pacing and intonation. I nearly quit listening before I sped it up by 20%. It's nearly impossible to tell it's being sped up on this one. I feel like you can tell how tired the narrator was while recording certain sections. At the beginning of the book, his performance is crawling, and then, as if he started a new session, in the middle of a section he all the sudden sounds like he has a pulse.

If the performance weren't bad enough, this guy didn't even bother to look up how to pronounce nautical terms. And oh, god, "Flotilla". It's like he's trying to be clever and pronounce it in the Spanish style, but he doesn't understand Spanish pronunciation and just says "flota". It's not that hard. I get that you might not know how to pronounce "indefatigable" or "mainsail" but come on man, just say flo-till-uh. It sounds like it looks!

Please, audiobook publishing powers that be, please get this one recorded by a competent narrator.

Great book!

Wonderful book. Great narrator, but the audio isn’t edited at all for volume. At times too quiet, and at time way too loud.

Too Changeable in Volume

The story is very good but the changes in volume of the reader make it hard to hear one moment and blaring the next.

terrible narrator story starts confusing and weak

I listened to all 21 books of the Master and Commander Audible series in large part of the narration. I immensely enjoyed the first two Hornblower books Midshipman and Lieutenant also in large part because of the narration. I was extremely disappointed with the Audible book and will be returning it as soon as I can figure out how.

Phoenix Books and Nicolas Coster suck

At the conclusion of this narration, a spokesman from Phoenix Book's goes on a distasteful and insulting tirade about what they do to copyright violators. This is truly absurd; Nicolas Coster is such a terrible narrator that, no one would possibly want to make an illegal recording of this audio book.

The Horatio Hornblower series is classic, second only to Patrick Obrian's Aubry-Maturin series of historical fiction about the British navy. Like the O'brian series, I have read the Hornblower tales several times and I assumed the audio books would be equally good. I assumed wrong. Coster whispers dialog so that you have to turn the volume up only to find him shouting the next second. The dialog takes care of this by saying: "...., she whispered", or "....he shouted." You don't need this moron actually shouting or whispering to make the point.

I normally don't return audio books for a refund, but I'm going to make an exception for Phoenix Books' and Mr. Coster's performance. That will, also, be true, going forward, each and every time there is such a copyright rant at the end of future books.

Herb Moore

Great story, fair reading

Another great Hornblower title with plenty of action. I always feel myself pulling for Hornblower and wishing for another list of accolades and accomplishments. The reading however wasnt spectacular. Coster just doesnt quite deliver as well as the previous narrator and at times goes on like a man giving his dying wishes. His dramatic interpretation just dragged on in parts, almost lulling my interest away. This recording also needs to be remastered and volume levels equalized. This is editing 101, no excuse for this.....

Continues the Story Nicely

I enjoyed the story, even though there seems to be gaps in the story line or odd interactions that don't necessary seem relevant.

However, the change in narrator was disappointing. Nicolas wasn't necessarily bad, but everything was very mono-tone compared to the previous narrator who reenacted the bellowing of commands and had a much wider voice inflection.

Uugghh the narrator!

Awesome book! I’ve always LOVED hornblower! This narrator has really good voices and inflection but YOU CAN HEAR MOST OF IT. I had to have the volume at full blast and then he would be SO LOUD sometimes and the rest of the sentence would fall off and I couldn’t hear or understand it. So sad!