"Atkinson’s first novel starring Papa Hemingway as a sleuth (Hemingway Deadlights, 2009) was set in 1956 and found the world-famous author on the verge of serious decline. This time the clock moves back to Hemingway’s salad days, 1937 and the Spanish civil war. But what gives this series its spunk is the way Atkinson plays against the he-man Papa stereotype, showing us Hemingway the blowhard, Hemingway the sloppy drunk, and even Hemingway the hypocrite. And, yet, there is also Hemingway the craftsman (groping after the story that would eventually become For Whom the Bell Tolls) and Hemingway the stand-up guy, refusing to look the other way when a story slaps him upside the head. This time that story concerns the murder of one of the Spanish Republic’s leading officials. Hemingway, with the timid assistance of idealistic but ineffectual John Dos Passos, lumbers after the scoop, ruffling numerous feathers along the way and winding up in Guernica at exactly the wrong time."—Booklist