MixedThe Historical Novel Society\"Wascom writes stunning prose, especially of the seascape and shorebirds that Isaac loves to draw; the author portrays the New Orleans underworld and soldiers of fortune in equally vivid terms. Violence is a crucial element, and there’s plenty of it. Wascom apparently wishes to show how greed, lust for power, and jealousy cause bloodletting, and how new life blithely occupies the space once held by the dead ... With a brilliant exception of the scenes during the war years, The New Inheritors evokes no particular era and thus feels groundless as historical fiction. I’m not sure the marvelous prose rescues the book for lovers of the literary, either; I found it a struggle to finish.\
