Ready for Your Close-up, Mr. Sakey

These days, authors expend a lot of energy promoting themselves and their work. Book launches, signings, interviews--everyone from the best-known writers to the least-known seem equally concerned about spreading the word. How then, one might wonder, does an author know when he or she has done enough? When, one might say, does an author know he’s has arrived?

For Marcus Sakey, author of The Blade Itself and At the City’s Edge (both from St. Martin’s Minotaur), that moment might have come earlier this week when cookbook and Food Network diva Rachel Ray announced a list of her favorite things during a New York Post interview. Among them: Austin, Texas; the movie Juno; Bobby Goren from Law & Order: Criminal Intent; the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl; and, most salient of all for this discussion, Ray said, “I love crime books, and The Blade Itself, by Marcus Sakey, is just fantastic. I can’t put it down.”

Her voice may be slightly irritating and her cheeriness sometimes kind of grating, but, clearly, you can’t say anything against Rachel Ray’s taste in reading material.

At The City’s Edge is out January 22. Publishers Weekly praises the novel for “[h]igh-tension action, intricate plotting and a Chicago setting that thrums and pulses with the feel of the city ... Sakey, who draws disturbing and thought-provoking parallels between Baghdad and Chicago, provides enough narrow escapes, traps and obstacles to satisfy a Die Hard fan, but enough meat to please readers who demand more than pyrotechnics.”