Critical Praise

"This haunting and intense narrative's writing explodes on each page with precise ferocity."

——Dallas Morning News

"The Night Inspector is a tough, horrific, exciting novel, well-crafted and operating on several levels at once. Busch is as dazzling a writer as ever, weaving seamless transitions from the war flashbacks to Bartholomew's 1867 exploits, along with serious meditations on the use of artifice and the meaning of fiction. The novel also has a boat chase on the Judson as gripping as any since Sherlock Holmes went down the Thames in The Sign of Four...Than any writer might surpass the achievement of a novel as good as Girls would be unexpected. But with The Night Inspector, Frederick Busch has done it, and it's astonishing. Right now, he may be the best writer in America."

——Philadelphia Inquirer

"A sublimely dark work of almost unbearable beauty. An exploration of evil, hidden identities and the dehumanizing forces of commerce, The Night Inspector has a moral heft and stylistic grace not unlike the work of [Herman Melville]."

——The Wall Street Journal

"A stylistic gem of a book, flawlessly plotted and philosophically rich . . . Busch has followed his remarkable novel, Girls, not with a merely effective novel, but an essential one. . . . Stunning."

——Boston Globe