The Bad News Bible - Softcover

Anna Blundy has worked in the news media since leaving Oxford in 1992, from doing the photocopying at ABC news in Moscow to being the Moscow bureau chief for the Times. She has published two books, EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE, a memoir of her father, a war correspondent who was killed by a sniper in El Salvador in 1989, and ONLY MY DREAMS, a novel set in England and Russia. She lives in Italy with her husband, Horatio, and children Lev and Hope. Her proudest achievement is having been a blues singer in a Moscow band in the early 1990s and she wishes she was more like her heroine, Faith Zanetti.

*Starred Review* It’s odd that there aren’t more foreign-correspondent series leads in crime fiction. The job requires a classic hard-boiled hero—tough talking, cynical to the bone, and capable of ingesting prodigious amounts of booze and cigarettes—and the work entails jumping from one dangerous venue to another, perfect for keeping the story lines fresh. British journalist Faith Zanetti fits the bill perfectly, and though her adventures have been published in the UK for the last several years, they are only beginning to arrive here (see Vodka Neat). In this installment, following adentures in Russia and Colombia, Faith is posted to Jerusalem and happily reconnects with a gang of old pals, comrades-in-khakis, and settles into a comfortable, vodka-fueled routine, searching for a supposed mole in Israeli intelligence. Then her best friend, Shiv, is murdered, and Faith has a new story: tracking down the child-trafficking ring that Shiv was investigating before she died. Both plotlines come together, of course, as Faith tastes the terror of daily life in Jerusalem from both Israeli and Palestinian points of view. Like Matt Beynon Rees, in his wonderful Omar Yussef series, Blundy, a journalist herself, puts a distinctly human face on the headlines while telling a corker of a story. Maybe she relies a little too heavily on genre clichés here—one too many scenes of the gang at the bar—but no self-respecting hard-boiled fan wants to be caught counting drinks. This is a keeper; don’t miss it. --Bill Ott