News of a Kidnapping—like any new work by García Márquez—received a great deal of attention when it was first published in Spanish in 1996, and the following year, in English. A welter of reviewers focused their attention on the myriad aspects of the book: its style, the events it depicted, the state ofaffairs in Colombia, the drug wars. While this book was a marked departure from the magical realism that characterizes García Márquez's fiction, few reviewers found this to be cause for complaint. The dramatic events that García Márquez has to work with easily provided what John Bemrose called in Maclean's, "thrillerlike momentum." Indeed, as Michiko Kakutani pointed out in The Houston Chronicle, García Márquez "uses his novelist's instinct for emotional drama to give the reader a wonderfully immediate...