He is one of our best living novelists, very much in the tradition of Graham Greene and John Le Carre and I avidly consume every one of his books the moment they are released.

His latest - The Collaborator - has given me six months of slow and appreciative reading - it is absolutely brilliant and should be in paperback in time for your holidays if you enjoy thrillers with real characters and meticulous research and detail.

Set mainly in Naples and in the middle of the Mafia type gangs that control local life, I cannot recommend it highly enough.