Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home to bring news of their latest victory. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he caused to the French intelligence network in the New World and the British packet carrying them is shadowed by two American privateers.

The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination of this seventh Aubrey/Maturin adventure, as anything Patrick O'Brian has ever written.

'Vividly detailed 19th-century settings and dramatic tension punctuated with flashes of wry humor make O'Brian's nautical adventure a splendid treat.' (Publishers Weekly)