PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt appears in English at a time when the debate about separating fake from fact is at the forefront of contemporary historical and political debate here. He decided he wanted to know not so much whether Marco lied (though he turns the question into a fascinating and suspenseful historical whodunit) but why ... The book is both a tribute to Cercas’s investigative zeal and a series of dramatic confrontations between the writer and the impostor ... One of the highlights of Cercas’s portrait of his impostor quarry is a tour de force imposture of his own, in which he captures Marco’s grandiose comic rhetoric — an imposture of an impostor ... But though Cercas seems on the verge of being taken in, it turns out that he has been conning the con man ... It’s satisfying to think that this monster has finally been painted into a corner.
