The New York Times pronounces. Twice.

The New York Times Book Review ran the briefest of reviews for the US paperback of A Vengeful Longing on Sunday. Except that in the print edition they reviewed my earlier Porfiry Petrovich novel, The Gentle Axe, under the title of A Vengeful Longing. The online edition of the supplement carried the correct review, and this correction:

A brief description in the Paperback Row column on Page 16 this weekend, about “A Vengeful Longing,” by R. N. Morris (Penguin, $15), was published in error. It describes a previous book by the same author. A correct description of “A Vengeful Longing” follows:

In this sequel to “The Gentle Axe” — “CSI: St. Petersburg,” our reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, called it — Morris returns to the city in the late 1860s. His protagonist, once again, is Porfiry Petrovich, who solved Raskolnikov’s crime in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Here, Petrovich discovers a link between three apparently unrelated murders in a book that is richly evocative of its time and place.

Ellen Meister, the author of The Smart One and Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, who is a friend of mine from the writing website zoetrope.com, very kindly scanned in the print edition, which carries the mistaken review: