This is quite simply terrific. It is the first in a planned sequence of novels featuring the war correspondent Faith Zannetti and it starts with her being posted to Israel. Faith is a great creation the plot is fast and furious. Blundy wrote of her father’s death in El Salvador in Every Time we say Goodbye and her background shines through this.
Faith Zanetti isn’t covering Israel out of some kind of altruism. She’s there because she got posted there by the fat drunk who is her foreign editor. And she loves it. It’s hot, it’s complicated, there’s always some action and her friends are there, slouched at the bar of Jerusalem’s American Colony hotel. But when Faith finds the naked corpse of her best friend, Shiv, hanging from the doorframe of her hotel room, she can’t keep her journalistic distance any more…
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.
