New York, NY: Harcourt (1999)

"The Night Inspector" follows the extraordinary life of William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, as he returns from the battlefields to New York City, bent on reversing his fortunes. It is there he meets Jessie, a Creole prostitute who engages him in an adventure that has its origins in the complexities and despair of the conflict he has left behind. Bartholomew befriends someone who can help him -- a deputy inspector of customs named Herman Melville, who, largely forgotten as a writer, is condemned to live in the wake of his vanished literary success and in the turmoil of his fractured family.