British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, with his great love, Diana Villiers, speed home to England with news of their latest victory over the Americans. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the trio run into trouble when they attract the menacing attention of two American privateers. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks--and the highs and lows of the love affair between Maturin and Villiers--is as tense, stirring, and unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O'Brian has written in his epic series.