SOURCE: Hensher, Philip. “A Gangster Takes on the State.” Spectator 278, no. 8813 (28 June 1997): 43-4.

In the following review, Hensher praises News of a Kidnapping, complimenting García Márquez for “giving the reader exactly the right details and leading him through a complicated series of events with perfect clarity.”

Through it doesn't live up to the excitement of a new novel by Gabriel García Márquez, the true story he tells in this book is so strange and interesting that, even ignoring the fascination of the author's personality, it deserves to be widely read. It is often forgotten, by his legion of readers in Europe and North America, that he is a Colombian novelist. He seems, in his plain, visionary novels, to be too big to be confined by national borders; he appears to us to belong first, to Latin America as a whole, and then to the...