Christopher Buckley’s style of satire has a peculiar bite: It nibbles, nibbles, nibbles—gently, even delightfully—before chomping down and leaving teeth marks as distinctive as any known to forensic science. In such novels as Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, Florence of Arabia, and Boomsday, he gnawed at journalists, spies, lobbyists, and other assorted taffies. But he seems to have tired of the taste of present-day political culture. His last book, 2015’s The Relic Master, is a tale of historical fiction set in the 1500s; his new book, The Judge Hunter, is set in the 1600s; and he apparently aims to write subsequent books set in subsequent centuries through our own.

The Judge Hunter is a brisk adventure with protesting Quakers, dour Puritans, violent Indian tribes, and a Brazilian parrot. The great English diarist Samuel Pepys gets the story rolling in 1664. He wants to be rid of Balthasar de St. Michel, his wife’s nuisance of a brother, and so contrives to have him shipped off to New England on a royal assignment to hunt down two fugitive judges who had signed the death warrant for Charles I in 1649. What Pepys doesn’t know, however, is that his in-law’s mission has a secret secondary purpose: “Balty” is, simply by being his dunderheaded self, to raise a ruckus not only in New England but in New Netherland, antagonizing and confusing the Dutch leadership there to soften them up for an invasion by a small English fleet.