A long overdue re-reading of Melville's strangest, darkest novel -- the last he published in his lifetime. This edition features an introduction and extensive annotations by H Bruce Franklin who does an impressive job teasing out the novel's many themes, references, games, and double-meanings. This is a novel one should approach with care -- it is, as the title would suggest, filled with tricks and disguises. Melville's sentences are usually clearer and more colloquial than those of his contemporaries but here many of his sentences are filled with mis-direction, like little shell-games. I am still working out much of what Melville is up to in The Confidence Man -- what I do know is that there is much brilliance to be found throughout. The last chapter is some of Melville's finest writing: evocative, unsettling, funny, and beautiful.