The Barnes & Noble Review It's late in the afternoon, and Frederick Busch is having dinner in a restaurant high atop the stadium where the Florida State Seminoles play football. The sun is low in the sky, glinting off the empty bleachers, shining in the bearish Busch's narrowed eyes. "This is it, I think," Busch slowly says. He is not referring to his half-finished blackened grouper, upon which he continues to feast. "This book did me in. I put everything I had into it. It's dark. It's full of sex and violence, and it scares the hell out of me. You'll see," he says, shrugging. He is scheduled to read from the book in an hour, to what I expect to be a packed auditorium. "I'm not sure I'll ever write another one." There are four other writers at the table. From us comes a chorus of "aw, c'mon," a yawp of "yeah, right." I have heard Tim O'brien say the same thing after every single one of his books. Four or five years later, you wander into a bookstore and there's a new O'brien. Busch keeps busy with his grouper. He waves to a waiter to lower the blinds on the window. When his squint is gone, his face is impassive. "I mean it," he says. "I don't think I have anything left." Again he shrugs. "I'm not trying to be self-effacing," he says. "When you hear it, you'll understand." The book in question is his grandly entertaining The Night Inspector, a novel of post-Civil War New York, told from the point of view of William Bartholomew, once a brutally effective Union sniper whose face has been hideously mutilated and is hidden, most of the time, behind a pasteboard mask. The book featuresnotonly a Creole prostitute who exposes Bartholomew to a fetid underworld of murderers, whores, and the lingering postwar slave trade (a largely untold story) but also the sad husk of a man that is the late-career Herman Melville. Melville is working on the seamy docks as a deputy customs