Since good story ideas do not come along like streetcars even to master storytellers, it is a happy day when a compelling writer like Scott O'Dell meets a compelling subject like William Tyndale, the sixteenth-century martyr who first translated the Bible into English. An unlikely subject, one may think, for the author of "Island of the Blue Dolphins," "The King's Fifth," and other books set on the Pacific Coast. Yet Mr. O'Dell [in "The Hawk That Dare Not Hunt by Day"] seems completely at home in Europe in a conniving, turbulent age, and his subject gives him scope to examine a theme that has obviously haunted him for some time….

That this new story has some symbolic relation for [O'Dell] with his past books is apparent as soon as one sees that the name of Tom Barton's ship is the same as one of Scott O'Dell's earlier books...