Count me among those for whom this one didn't work. I was more interested in the opening scene (though I agree with Unblinking that the prose there was too heavily embroidered -- I might have been able to skip past all the adjectives on the page, but in audio they just kept slowing down the action), and the notion of an alt-hist America where the Navy employs warlocks. Then the leap to Ultima Thule, which seems to have been both the future *and* an alternate timeline, given that naval warlocks aren't treated as a known bit of history. I kind of felt like that element would have been stronger if it had been just future, not also alternate.
As for the '80s part . . . maybe it's that I'm too young to have really good nostalgia for the period? Things that might have been evocative weren't. And the characters, while okay, were a lot less interesting to me than the original set. It picked up again once Kat went outside and saw Jeff "beating up Mozart" (which was, admittedly, a fun description), but all the stuff prior to that felt like a detour to me, asking me to care about their plans to get away to San Francisco when I wanted to know more about the pirate and the warlock.
Finally the ending, which was definitely too pat. I didn't like Brady being offered up as a sacrificial lamb of sorts, I didn't like Kat's obsession with the boots, and her role as "hag" missed the target of "awesome parallelism" and instead hit "well, that's convenient." My take was that she *did* have magic powers, not just that she convinced the guys to obey her -- but where did that come from? She's got the telepathy thing with Jeff, but that never really justified itself to me; it was just a way for her to know he was possessed. Sure, she dresses like a goth, but she denies being a witch, so clearly she doesn't work for her power. Then where did she get it? Just coincidence? Or from her identity as a "fag hag"? It might have worked in a story about half the length of this one, where wordplay can be enough to hold the ending together, but not in this case.
Which is a shame, because time-traveling body-hopping pirates and naval warlocks and such sounded like a really fabulous premise. But the result didn't hang together enough for me. I enjoyed it somewhat while listening, but the more I thought about it afterward, the less satisfied I was.