Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by dispatch vessel to
bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is
a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence
network in the New World, and the attention of two privateers soon
becomes menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows
of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination, as
anything Patrick O'Brian has written.