"Gripping--Didion at her finest"

 Truly her best. 

The novel in question being The Last Thing He Wanted  1996 

Some excerpts: 

For the record this is me talking. 

You know me, or think you do. 

The not quite omniscient author. 

No longer moving fast. 

No longer traveling light. 

    When I resolved in 1994 to finally tell this story, register clues I had missed ten years before, process the information before it vanished altogether, I considered reinventing myself as PAO at the embassy in question, a career foreign service officer operating under the USICA umbrella. "Lilliane Owen" was my name in that construct, a strategy I ultimately jettisoned as limiting, small-scale, an artifice to no point. She told me later, Lilliane Owen would have had to keep saying, and I learned this after the fact. As Lilliane Owen I was unconvincing even to myself. As Lilliane Owen I could not have told you half of what I knew. 

A painful ownership of self. Dispossessed of  self, I (had) have to tell you how (who) I am now (narrator) and was then (a fool). A gorgeous searching of self, of narrative, of authority. 

Further on: 

Sliding a thousand-dollar bill beneath the tray in the cash register, replacing the tray, counting out the hundreds. 

No place you could not pass a hundred. 

There in the sweet heavy air of South Florida. 

Havana so close you could see the two-tone Impalas on the Malecon. 

Goddamn but we had some fun there. 

The music would give you the sweet heavy air, the music would give you Havana.  

The sense of place. The sense of nostalgia as inappropriate as wistfully gazing at a horizon in the times of Contra affair. Truly gorgeous. 

A truly great read, I implore you to pick it up. 

Joan Didion 

The Last Thing He Wanted

1996