Inner Harbor is the third book in the sweeping Chesapeake Bay Saga, a tale about three brothers who unite in a time of need. They honor their father's wish to raise young Seth as their own, and with all the brothers home again, the Quinn family has never been so strong. But, in the months to come, their strength is tested once again.

Phillip Quinn has done everything to make his life seem perfect. With his career on the fast track and a condo overlooking the Harbor, his life on the street is firmly in the past. But one look at Seth, and he's reminded of the boy he once was.

Phillip intends to fulfill his father's dying request and considers Seth to be a duty. However, he never expected he would grow to love Seth, and soon his promise to his father becomes more than just an obligation. Seth's future as a Quinn seems assured—until a stranger arrives in town. She claims to be researching St. Christopher's for her new book, but the true objects of study are the Quinns. Her cool reserve intrigues Phillip, and he is determined to uncover her motives. But she holds a secret that has the power to threaten the life the brothers have made for Seth—a secret that could tear the family apart forever.

Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought. In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers - this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. So Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys, animals and men.

Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs - thus crossing into "that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever."

What they find instead, is an extraordinary panoply of fiestas and circuses, dogs, horses and hawks, pilgrims and revolutionaries, grand haciendas and forlorn cantinas, bandits, gypsies and roving tribes, a young girl alone on the road, a mystery in the mountain wilds, and a myth in the making.

And in this wider world they fight a war as rageful as the one neither, in the end, will join up for back home. One brother finds his destiny, while the other arrives only at his fate.

An essential novel by any measure, and the transfixing middle passage of Cormac McCarthy's ongoing trilogy, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.