SOURCE: Hove, Thomas. Review of The Night Inspector, by Frederick Busch. Review of Contemporary Fiction 19, no. 3 (fall 1999): 179.

In the following review, Hove praises Busch's The Night Inspector, describing it as an outstanding work of historical fiction.

This remarkable historical novel [The Night Inspector] has one of the most interesting narrators in recent American fiction, a former sniper for the Union during the Civil War named William Bartholomew. His story plays out in 1867, in Manhattan's nightmarish Five Points neighborhood, where he befriends a customs inspector—one Herman Melville, whose fiction he at one time read and admired. Melville enthusiasts should be satisfied by Busch's portrayal of him and its sensitivity toward recent developments in Melville scholarship and biography. But Busch judiciously keeps Bartholomew at center stage, his story reflecting and extending the economic preoccupations and moral ambiguities of Melville's fiction. Half of his face having been shot off in...