I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times, and today we have two

conversations on the show. We're going to hear from Patricia Cornwell, author of the award-winning

forensic thrillers, featuring the beloved character Case Carpetta. Those books have now been

made into a series starring Nicole Kidman.

Cornwell is out with a new memoir, and it is quite a surprising story. We're going to hear

all about it. But first, the Pulitzer's were announced this week, and the big prize, the prize for

fiction, went to Daniel Kraus for his book, Angel Down.

I got to call Daniel the morning after the announcement to talk about this crazy book of his

and to hear how he was thinking about what this all means for him and the types of stories that he writes.

We at the book review put your book, Angel Down, on our list of top 10 books of the year last year.

So there might be some people who are already familiar with it and have read it and bought it.

But for those who haven't had a chance to get to it yet and might do so now that it has won this amazing prize, could you give just the briefest of summaries?

And then I have so many questions for you about the book.

Yeah, it's a World War I novel about these five soldiers,

these five privates who are some of the, about the five worst in this division.

And they are left behind to essentially euthanize a soldier who people can hear screaming out in no man's land,

presumably tied up in barbed. This kind of thing happened. But when they, essentially, when they

go out there, what they don't find is a soldier at all. They find an angel who has been shot down

out of the sky by artillery, which was sort of new and high flying during World War I.

And this angel has been hit and has fallen into the barbed wire. And then these men realize very

quickly they have some sort of miraculous being on their hand. And this being has inscrutable

ability to heal and help and could potentially even end the war.

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