This pleasant surprise came across my desk yesterday. A blogger at The Skeptical Bureaucrat writes:

I picked up some nice items at the AAFSW* book fair last week, and one of them was this quirky novel Two Pumps for the Body Man, which the author describes as a soft-boiled diplomatic noir…

The story is a series of Catch-22 situations in which an ambitious CG battles with her RSO at the “second worst facility in the entire Foreign Service.” That description of the facility is decidedly not fictional. The post is unnamed, but it’s the Consulate in Saudi Arabia that’s across the street from a big hospital. Maybe you know the one. It’s still a dump.

The story ends with a terrorist attack on the unnamed Consulate, something which is also not at all fictional. See this essay by the author in the Foreign Service Journal. The novel is well worth reading for that part alone.

I give it two thumbs up (or something, since I don’t have a ratings scale). This novel might make me start a book review feature.

Note to self: Start a new feature called Blog of the Week. Begin with The Skeptical Bureaucrat. Give it some thumbs up.

*Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide

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