PositiveHouston Chronicle\"What Winslow has created in The Border is a politically explosive war epic that chronicles an arc of history over nearly half a century of a stalemated battle ... It’s a powerful, captivating, thought-provoking book ... In the sinewy prose of a crime thriller, the novel encompasses numerous settings and characters, as Winslow deftly transports readers inside the lives of those on both sides, from a young heroin junkie on the streets of New York to the party boys who represent the next generation of drug lords. Weighing in at more than 700 pages, The Border gives Winslow’s characters plenty of space for inner examination and self-justification.\
Philip Kerr
RaveThe San Antonio Express-NewsGreeks Bearing Gifts is the 13th Bernie book, each of them a polished gem of unsentimental detective writing echoing Chandler and Hammett in spirit, if not language ... in the latest novel he creates a vivid mosaic of Greek life at a key moment in the long life of the debt-ridden, corrupt, infinitely beautiful country ... The entire series of books balances on the shoulders of Bernie Gunther, surely one of the most likable and confounding characters in modern detective fiction—or, it should be said, in contemporary English literature in general. For that is what Kerr has created, not mere formulaic genre novels, and Bernie’s moral ambiguity has a lot to do with the magnetic power of Kerr’s work.
Lev Grossman
RaveThe San Antonio Express NewsThe Magician King, like its predecessor, is a quest (this time for a holy relic, like a grail, but actually a series of seven keys), a picaresque tale, an allegory for growing up and discovering the world and becoming an adult. (There is also a fair amount of meditation on what it means to be truly heroic.) ... It is deeper, richer, with more action and adventure, more unsuspected plot twists, as well as more irresistible characterizations ... Grossman, a devilishly seductive writer, evokes classic themes in the Magician books that have haunted literature — and us — since nomadic storytellers began singing narrative songs ...in Quentin Coldwater he has created a hero with serious flaws, for whom self-satisfaction — wholeness — remains just out of reach ... Startlingly original and enormously inventive, these books — and they should be read in order — seem destined to be classics of our perplexing times, perhaps because they mirror them so acutely.
