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Book Reviewed by:In the latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley, a hapless Englishman embarks on a dangerous mission to the New World in pursuit of two judges who helped murder a king.
London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy has been restored and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar "Balty" St. Michel is twenty-four and has no skills and no employment. He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer in the king's navy.
Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New World. He is to track down two missing judges who were responsible for the execution of the last king, Charles I. When Balty's ship arrives in Boston, he finds a strange country filled with fundamentalist Puritans, saintly Quakers, warring tribes of Indians, and rogues of every stripe. Helped by a man named Huncks, an agent of the Crown with a mysterious past, Balty travels colonial America in search of the missing judges. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Samuel Pepys prepares for a war with the Dutch that fears England has no chance of winning.
Christopher Buckley's enchanting new novel spins adventure, comedy, political intrigue, and romance against a historical backdrop with real-life characters like Charles II, John Winthrop, and Peter Stuyvesant. Buckley's wit is as sharp as ever as he takes readers to seventeenth-century London and New England. We visit the bawdy court of Charles II, Boston under the strict Puritan rule, and New Amsterdam back when Manhattan was a half-wild outpost on the edge of an unmapped continent. The Judge Hunter is a smart and swiftly plotted novel that transports readers to a new world.
While the novel is historical, its themes are particularly exigent today. It acknowledges America's troubled past built on the murder of indigenous peoples and fraught with religious persecution despite the promise of religious freedom. Yet it also successfully reflects current divides in our own culture over religion and a strict adherence to a particular doctrine. The novel does not discount religion but rather its fundamentalist tendencies. Therefore, Buckley's combination of humor and history creates a compelling satire of our own modern existence...continued
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(Reviewed by Emily Isackson).
In The Judge Hunter, Balty's brother-in-law, Samuel Pepys, an important historical figure in 17th century London, plays an integral role.
Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps) was born in London in 1633. He completed grammar school during the English Civil War and witnessed the execution of King Charles I in 1649 at the age of 15. He continued his education at Magdalene College, Cambridge, receiving a Bachelor of Arts. He then went to work for Edward Montagu, a relative who became the first Earl of Sandwich. It is believed that his time with Montagu helped advance Pepys' career.
In 1655, Pepys married Elizabeth St. Michel (Balty's sister in the novel), who at the time was 15 years old. In June of 1660, he became Clerk of the Acts of the...
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