“The history is thoroughly researched, the fiction inventive, the style at once easygoing and rapid.... This is a marvelous and richly enjoyable novel, and the intended series to follow promises to do for the American Navy and the Marines what C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian did for the Royal Navy.... More, please.” (Wall Street Journal)

“James L. Haley has taken the naval adventure genre to places it has not gone before, filled with strong, believable characters who nearly jump of the page, deeply researched details of life both here and abroad...and a powerful, sweeping view of one of the seminal events in the early history of our country...a rollicking good time.” (Brian Kilmeade, author of Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates) 

“It's a rare novelist who has a commanding grasp of history, and it's a rare historian who has an intuitive understanding of how to bring fictional characters to life. Fortunately for us readers of the Shores of Tripoli - and (please!) of the next book about Lieutenant Bliven Putnam - James L. Haley fuses historian and novelist into a spellbinding storytelling whole. There could be no better captain to sail this ship.” (Stephen Harrigan, best-selling author of The Gates of the Alamo and A Friend of Mr. Lincoln)