Moscow X by David McCloskey
D Magazine profiled McCloskey (and his intriguing wife) last year, after the Lakewood resident published his excellent first novel, Damascus Station. With his second novel, the former CIA analyst and McKinsey consultant shows that his writing has only gotten sharper. Two CIA operatives—a wealthy Mexican horse breeder and a London-based asset manager—must pretend to be lovers as they go to Russia and try to recruit Vladimir Putin’s private banker. There is sex. There is violence. And there’s a lot of page-turning action that only someone with a real-world knowledge of spycraft could write. Here’s a recent tweet from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof: “It’s a taut thriller by an author who was formerly a CIA officer and knows his ops. Terrific read, cementing McCloskey in my mind as the best spy fiction writer since LeCarré.”
W.W. Norton & Company, 464 pages
We spoke with McCloskey on his latest novel, Moscow X. Tune in and listen to the podcast here.
Night Will Find You by Julia Heaberlin
Dallas-based bestselling author Julia Heaberlin, with six thrillers to her credit, could be content to turn out airport pulp. Her propulsive plots alone could make a cross-country flight zip by in a blink. But her novels of suspense (like 2020’s We Are All the Same in the Dark) always aim for something more and consistently achieve it. Night Will Find You is her best yet. The characters who feel like they exist off the page and the story—nominally about an astrophysicist with psychic gifts trying to solve a cold-case kidnapping, but so much more than that—tightens its embrace until you’re breathless.
Flatiron Books, 368 pages
The City That Killed the President: A Cultural History of Dallas & The Assassination, Volume One by Tim Cloward
You could build a library out of all the books about the JFK assassination and still have enough left over to add a parking garage. So why one more? Because Tim Cloward’s effort is not as interested in the conspiracy theories surrounding the event so much as the city in which it happened and the art that resulted from it, referenced it, presaged it. Is there enough for the three planned volumes that Cloward, a Dallas writer and educator, teases in the introduction? November marks 60 years since the assassination, and it has been discussed without interruption. I think that answers that. (P.S. We forgive him for the shot he fires at D Magazine in this book.)
La Reunion, 280 pages
Standing: One Man’s Odyssey Through the Turbulent ’60s by Ernest McMillan
Full disclosure: after writing about civil rights hero Ernest McMillan a few years ago for D Magazine, I told the publisher La Reunion that he had a memoir. I ended up editing it for them. It was easy work. McMillan’s story takes him from Dallas to the heart of the movement in Georgia and Mississippi and back again; then on the run through Canada and Africa; and, finally, to a Texas prison. The last section alone, which consists of jailhouse letters to his mother, makes this book worth your time. But McMillan succeeds in putting the reader on his shoulder as he offers an intimate look at what fighting against the system really costs those involved.
La Reunion, 308 pages
Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry edited by George Getschow
Larry McMurtry likely would not want you to read this collection of essays by friends and family, fans and fellow travelers (Diana Ossana, William Broyles, and Lawrence Wright among them). Not because it is bad; far from it. Mostly because it’s a book—assembled by Getschow, the longtime UNT Mayborn Literary Conference impresario—about him. He would prefer you read a book by him, or one of the many he recommends by proxy throughout these pages. We suggest you do both, to get a fuller portrait of the curmudgeonly, prodigiously talented (and productive) bookman.
University of Texas Press, 272 pages
This story originally appeared in the October issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Paper Chase.” Write to [email protected].
Authors
Zac Crain
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