Hesh Kestin is a recovering foreign correspondent who reported on local wars, global business and exotic mayhem in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for such publications as
Forbes,
Newsday and the
Jerusalem Post, and wrote for US magazines as diverse as
Playboy and
Inc.
His novel
The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats is Stephen King’s recommended read for World Book Night.
From Kestin's Q & A with novelist Declan Burke:
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
‘Exodus’, and not the one by Leon Uris. In this shrewdly penned thriller, an Egyptian nobleman takes it on the lam after knocking off one of Pharaoh’s brutal overseers. Then, after discovered the secret of his birth, he blackmails the bossman himself by hitting him with plague after plague until the big hood finally relents: In history’s greatest heist, the newly minted but fast-thinking yid walks off with the equivalent of a couple billion quid [figuring the average slave was a cool thou] plus livestock and uncounted treasure. And that’s only the caper. What happens next would make a hell of a movie. Wait a minute, they may have already done it.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Hesh Kestin. When I was a journalist the CIA had me down for a Mossadnilk, the Mossad thought I was CIA and -- for the three years I was based in London -- MI5 interviewed me entirely too often. Alas, my only secret was...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
