Joan Didion. 
 
Knopf: 1996. Advance review copy. Octavo. Tanning and shelf wear along the edges of the wraps. Light smudges there too. Slight dings on the corners of the front wraps. Foxing on the top and fore edges of the text block. This foxing intrudes a little on the margins of the first couple and last few leaves. 227 pages. Signed. 
 
Didion and thriller are two words not usually combined in literary conversations. Yet that is what this novel does, and it does it with a female protagonist in mourning, arms deals in Central America, and characters who may or may not exist. Collect this signed copy for a Didion collection that goes beyond the obvious. 
 
"Get me audio, someone was always saying in the nod where we were. Agence Presse is moving the story. Somewhere in the nod we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity. Weightlessness seemed at the time the safer mode. Weightlessness seemed at the time the mode in which we could beat both the clock and affect itself, but I see now that it was not. I see now that the clock was ticking. I see now that we were experiencing not weightlessness but what is interestingly described on page 1513 of the Merck Manual (Fifteenth Edition) as a sustained reactive depression, a bereavement reaction to the leaving of familiar environments."