I just got back from some book events in California. Thanks to everyone who hosted me–it was a lot of fun. I want especially to thank Hugh Hewitt, who–as his listeners know–is one of the best interviewers on radio. He read and liked Banquo’s Ghosts, and was very generous in his praise during an hour-long interview. I joked with a friend afterwards that the interview caught me off-guard because I had become so used to radio interviews being about anything but the book. Here is the transcript and here is Hugh’s column today on Iran that has a nice passage on Banquo’s Ghosts:

For those who simply refuse to read history or any sort of nonfiction, National Review Editor Rich Lowry’s excellent new thriller, “Banquo’s Ghosts,” is an easy way to at least begin to grasp the realities of Iranian enmity toward America and the dire consequences of a successful lurch by Iran to nuclear status. The book is a great page-turner that promises Lowry and his co-author, Keith Korman, will be back with sequels a la Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp blockbusters, and the merit of the novel, far beyond its real entertainment value, is like that found in Flynn’s works or those of Daniel Silva or Alex Bereson: Their stories all convey important truths about the world we live in through plots that draw deeply from the realities of the world around us.
In the case of “Banquo’s Ghosts,” the reality is not just in the portraits of bureaucratic incompetents in America’s intelligence agencies or of the occasional hypercompetent espionage operative — the former all too true, the latter, sadly, too good to be true — but far more importantly in the message that Iran’s radical elites are irrevocably committed to a real war against America. The novel drives home truths about the fanaticism of Iran’s ruling elite in the same way that John le Carre and Len Deighton educated a generation of Americans about the Soviets’ operations and operatives.