Reviews in Washington Post & The Strand

Today, the Washington Post publishes my reviews of Cara Black‘s Murder in the Latin Quarter and Andrea Camilleri‘s August Heat. With the recent trend of staycations, these books offer a great way to travel cheaply to some exotic locale and encounter a little adventure in the process — and Camilleri’s book, though released back in March, is now aptly titled for the current heatwave, though I hope our weather affects local readers with less severity than it did the good Inspector Montalbano. 

I also received yesterday my new issue of The Strand, with some timely articles after recent weekend conversations. Both Friday and Saturday night, I ended up in conversations about Denis Johnson — mostly about his National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke but also about his earlier novel Already Dead and his most recent book Nobody Move — and my own review of Nobody Move (the audiobook in this case) appears in the latest issue of The Strand. Additionally, twice over the last week, I’ve gotten into conversations about old John Le Carré books, specifically the George Smiley novels, and so I was pleased to see that The Strand has added a profile of Smiley to their “Great Detectives” series. And of course (burying the lead here), the new issue includes the first part of the much-ballyhooed publication of an unfinished Graham Greene novel, The Empty Chair. That’s one of the next things on my to-read list for sure.