The latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley, in which a hapless
Englishman embarks on a dangerous mission to the New World in pursuit of
two judges who helped murder a king.
London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy
has been restored and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who
conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar
"Balty" St. Michel is twenty-four and has no skills and no employment.
He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer
in the king's navy.
Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New
World. He is to track down two missing judges who were responsible for
the execution of the last king, Charles I. When Balty's ship arrives in
Boston, he finds a strange country filled with fundamentalist Puritans,
saintly Quakers, warring tribes of Indians, and rogues of every stripe.
Helped by a man named Huncks, an agent of the Crown with a mysterious
past, Balty travels colonial America in search of the missing judges.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Samuel Pepys prepares for
a war with the Dutch that fears England has no chance of winning.
Christopher Buckley's enchanting new novel spins adventure, comedy,
political intrigue, and romance against a historical backdrop with
real-life characters like Charles II, John Winthrop, and Peter
Stuyvesant. Buckley's wit is as sharp as ever as he takes readers to
seventeenth-century London and New England. We visit the bawdy court of
Charles II, Boston under the strict Puritan rule, and New Amsterdam back
when Manhattan was a half-wild outpost on the edge of an unmapped
continent. The Judge Hunter is a smart and swiftly plotted novel that
transports readers to a new world.
