This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books Podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and I'm very pleased this week to be joined by one of America's great crime writers, Sarah

Peretzky, who's just about to publish the 19th, I think I'm right insane, of her V.I.

Washawski novels, which is called Shell Game.

Shellgame takes sort of two strands, I think it's fair to say, doesn't it?

In one of them, Vic's best friend's son

seems to be a suspect in a murder and he's involved in kind of immigration activism. And in the

other, it's her niece turns up on her doorstep, her long-lost niece, her sister having

disappeared and amid a murky tale of sexual harassment and corporate malfeasance.

I don't think that gets away too much.

But Sarah, these two strands, they're both very personal to Vic,

but they also seem quite obviously to hit the Me Too movement on one side of them

and the sort of ICE, the immigration thing.

I mean, was it very conscious for you to kind of make

this novel speak to the historical moment? Not in that way, not with the Me Too movement,

because I had written quite a lot of the novel before that actually got underway. I really struggled,

I would have written this novel a lot faster. We would have been sitting here eight months ago.

If I hadn't worried so much about the two strands and whether it was really stretching belief to have them come together the way they did,

I kept stopping and restarting. I just did a piece for Good Housekeeping in UK where they

asked me for the last book that made me cry. And I wanted to say my own book when I realized I had to

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