I followed Hornblower and the Hotspur with four more audiobooks, Hornblower and the Atropos, and then the original trilogy, these ones narrated by Nicholas Coster.
You do notice a discrepancy when you get to the first book, The Happy Return, because several of Hornblower's traits, said to go back to problems he had with his first lieutenant in his first command, don't match up with Hornblower and the Hotspur - and oddly, his first lietenant in both books is Bush, which raised the continuing nagging worry that maybe the Lieutenant/Hotspur Bush is not the Happy Return et al. Bush. Troubling, very troubling. But it just occurred to me that technically Hornblower's first command was the Retribution at the end of Lietenant Hornblower, so possibly that's what Forester was referring to. Although that doesn't explain how command idiosyncracies (principally the fetish about remaining silent) that aren't present in Hotspur/Atropos show up for the first time when Hornblower is captain of the Lydia. Such interesting questions. Anyway, I enjoyed the new narrator just as well, up into I lost my iPod coming back from camping at the beginning of June and couldn't re-download the book onto the iPad, which forced me to go to a backup plan - download the book (available for $6 on Amazon) to my KIndle account and actually read the last several chapters on the way home. It was a poor substitute because I was looking forward to the climax of the story being read to me, but it'll do. I'll listen to the last few chapters another time, I suppose.