You find yourself in New Orleans, a famous city you don’t know well, with a break of several hours between sessions of the conference that’s brought you to town. You decide to stroll a bit in the neighborhood of your hotel. No more than five minutes later, you come across an old-fashioned bookstore of the kind where you have spent countless hours over the decades but the likes of which you’ve rarely visited in recent years. You begin to browse: heavenly!
You’ve already picked up a couple of finds when you reach the fiction section, divided into various categories, and your eye is caught by the name of an author you’ve heard of but haven’t read: Eric Ambler. You pull one of his books, a 2004 Vintage/Black Lizard paperback, from the shelf: Passage of Arms, a novel first published in 1959.
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