“Lock’s latest entry in his superb American Novels series again features his remarkable eye for historical detail and fine-tuned felicity with the language of the period. At times, the sparkling prose is nearly indistinguishable from that of the authors Lock so clearly admires, Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. . . . The mellifluous language, literary allusions, and some subtle Moby-Dick parallels, such as Melville using a harpoon to kill rats in the hulls of ships, will delight fans of classic American literature.”