Some years ago--long enough that iPhones were not a thing but PDAs (personal digital assistants) were--I left a Palm Pilot in a cab in New York. I'd left it because I'd just giddily emerged from the first publisher's meeting about my first novel. I don't know where the expression cloud 9 comes from, but if there is such a thing, I was on cloud 10.

And then I realized I'd lost my PalmPilot. It wasn't quite the disaster of losing one's smartphone today, but it did have a lot of information on it, it was expensive, and I felt like an idiot.

The next day, I got an email from my editor. Someone had found my Palm Pilot in the cab. They'd looked at my calendar (again, this was so far back in time I didn't even have a passcode lock on the device), saw that I'd had a meeting and whom I had it with, looked up the phone number, made the call -- I had it back the next day. I chalked it up to the magic of that whole first-book experience.

Antoine Laurain's THE RED NOTEBOOK is filled with similar magic (albeit much more charmingly told). Bookseller Laurent finds a lost purse, and gradually pores through it to piece together a picture of whose bag it was -- and how he might get it back to her.

The secret here is a light touch. Laurain never overplays his hand; at times, the book almost plays like a fairy tale. But not a kids' tale -- the stakes are real, and so is his Paris. It's a challenge to capture the city in a way that's both charming and serious, and Laurain does it deftly here.

With THE PORTRAIT just out, I can't wait to read on...The Portrait