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:

Nobody told me...

... but way back in May I was Editor's Choice in the New York Times.

The New York Times weighs The Axe.

Thanks to everyone who has alerted me to this review in the New York Times. You may have to register to see it. It's free to do so.

Otherwise you can look at the same article that also ran in the International Herald Tribune.