The November 8th NY Times reported that Little, Brown & Company is pulling Assassin of Secrets by Q. R. Markham, because passages of the book were found to have been taken from a number of contemporary and classic works by such authors as Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, and Charles McCarry. A patron browsing our new titles display mentioned this to me as he inspected the book in question. He commented that it is a huge embarassment for Little, Brown that their editors did not catch the problematic passages. This sentiment is echoed by one of Times’s readers who commented online, “I’m more than a little amazed that the editor assigned to the book was so poorly read that the plagiarism wasn’t recognized until after publication….” Evanston Public Library has pulled its copy and cancelled further orders.
Barbara L.