The seventh novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home to bring 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 shadows of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination, as anything O'Brian has written.