It's tough to be a book junkie!

I wish there were more hours in the day that I could devote to reading. As it is, I already devote quite a bit of time to my favorite solitary activity (well, not totally, Mike reads in bed at the same time, so in that sense we are reading together, no?).

Anyway, I like to stay ahead of the game and keep my eyes and ears open for the fabulous stuff that is coming out. This one slipped by me. Could be that I don't read much espionage - something I am trying to change with recent Stella Rimington purchases - Gail Lynds having been pretty much my only prior experience with the genre. I'm also on a big, big, big UK kick right now which is not to say that I am not reading the stateside stuff (because I am) but just that I have been utilizing my "Wish List" and stuffing it with obscure stuff from overseas that I desperately want to get my hands on.

In my efforts to stay in the know now that I am not physically touching every fictional entry, I read PW and various blogs. One recent addition to my bookmarks is The Rap Sheet, can't remember where I heard about it first, but it was probably on another blog. Anyway, Alex Carr (Jenny Siler) and a review of her recent release The Prince of Bagram Prison, were the subject of one of today's entries on The Rap Sheet and I immediately had to add it to my "Books I Now Must Have" list.

Here's what PW had to say about The Prince of Bagram Prison:

"At the start of this intelligent spy thriller from the pseudonymous Carr (the author of Flashback and other novels under her real name, Jenny Siler), Kat Caldwell, a gutsy U.S. Army interrogator stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, takes charge of Jamal, a 15-year-old Moroccan boy caught in a jihadi sweep by a British Special Forces team. Having fled a degraded existence as an orphan in Morocco, the resourceful Jamal is no terrorist, Kat decides. After Jamal escapes custody, a team of American intelligence agents, working in both an official and unofficial capacity, go in search of him. Because of their earlier relationship, Kat is recruited to help locate the boy. When she realizes that something bad will happen if she finds him, she also goes on the run. Effortlessly shifting point of view and back and forth in time, Carr (An Accidental American) well deserves comparisons with the early John le Carré."

Flashback and Accidental American have also made it to my list. I'm thinking vacation reads!