James Abel is the pseudonym for Bob Reiss, an accomplished author and journalist who has written extensively on the Arctic. He lives and works in New York City.Abel's latest novel is Protocol Zero.
Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:
Since James Abel wears two hats, thriller writer and serious journalist, my reading habits go in both directions and both feed my writing. On the international thriller end, I'm currently rereading twoVisit James Abel's website.favorites: The Polish Officer by Alan Furst, and The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith. Both are wonderful books, evoking time and place and pitting a lone character against a very large evil. With Furst, that evil is the Nazis. With Smith, it is Stalin. In other words, the extreme left and extreme right both turn out to be evil.
On the non-fiction front, in Showdown, Wil Haygood's terrific upcoming book about the the fight to put Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court,again, an individual is pitted against evil, this time racism in the US.
The issues that fascinate me don't confine themselves to one genre or the other. And good storytelling transcends the demands of any genre. If it works, in fact or in fiction, the reader is hooked.
The Page 69 Test: Protocol Zero.
--Marshal Zeringue
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