Mark Sutton

And so the only way they can really operate is to assume really that no one is on their side.

And so you're quite right.

So the police officer says, you know, you're going to have to come and make a statement.

And she says, oh, yes, I will.

But within 15 minutes, they're on the street.

And she shows incredible resilience, but she also, she's a bookseller, this woman.

She's not, there's no one who would have ever had any idea of how to cope with something like that.

She's the middle class wife of a journalist.

So especially initially it's quite, they stumble a lot.

They don't really know what to do as if you would.

They end up in a hotel but she's quite easily tracked by the cartel when she gets to that hotel even though she gives a false name which is the name of the main character from Love in the Time of Cholera.

Like a good bookshop owner.

Yes, exactly.

So it's a customer who happens to share a very specific taste in reading with her.

This customer is very erudite, is very debonair and very interested in literature.

It transpires that this customer with whom she developed a relationship that if she was not married would probably have become a loving relationship or a sexual relationship.

It doesn't, but it turns out he is the head of the cartel.

I have to say that revelation was one of the bits in the book that was a little bit too fictionalized for me.

It didn't ring true in the way that a lot of the rest of the book did.

It was a good dramatic device on an emotional level, but this literature-loving cartel member did not seem like a realistic person to me.