Sometimes you read the right book

A couple of years back, when I went to Shanghai for Splinter Cell: Double Agent, I traveled with a rather large pile of books. They were mostly mystery novels, selected because they were disposable; books I'd gotten cheaply at the Wake County Library Sale and that I wouldn't mind leaving behind once they'd been read. There's a hotel in Paris that's got an entire library of James Lee Burke and Lawrence Block out of that.

Erick Wujcik, my Obi-Wan on this particular sojourn, noticed the books when h