Praise for Old Acquaintance:
Miami Herald
Feb. 25, 1979
Nicholas Guild is such a master craftsman, and his protagonist Ray Guinness is such a compassionate, humane and deadly assassin, Old Acquaintance almost takes your breath away. . .This is a magnificent novel, and so Protestant in its ethics that we suddenly understand Nathaniel Hawthorne for the first time.
Reviewed by Charles Willeford
Publishers Weekly
Oct. 30, 1978
Guild, a professor of English at Ohio State University, is often amusing and is a master of timing, plot and style.
Washington Post
December 28, 1978
The Ray Guinness novels, so far, have contained a rich emotional mix—different in texture from the gray dialectics of LeCarré or the knotty exploration of personal motivations in McCarry, but akin to both of them and comparable in interest. . . Nicholas Guild exhibits the required skill in plot complications, a good sense of setting and atmosphere and the mandatory familiarly with the trivia of espionage, but his basic attraction is that he writes about believable human beings. I will look forward to the next Ray Guinness novel.
Reviewed by Joseph McLellan
Sacramento Bee
Feb. 18, 1979
With this book, author Nicholas Guild cements his reputation as one of the best writers of the genre.
Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram
Jan. 7, 1979
Old Acquaintance is a thriller with a difference. On one level it is an absolutely chlling novel of suspense. On another, it is a probing examination of one man’s psyche and the tenuous emotional bounds that bind and break in human relationships It is a study of desolation—the bleak after effects of los have rarely been so trenchantly explored in a novel of this kind—and it is a swift, savage thriller that, once begun, is absolutely impossible to put down until the last page is turned.
Guild’s characters are marvelously alive, and his depiction of South Carolina is superb. One feels the sticky heat, hears the hum of insects, sees the red clay and scraggy pines. The prose is lean, muscular, taut. Old Acquaintance is a brilliant achievement, a magnificent read. Its author is a master of the genre whose books are going to be around for a long, long time.
Reviewed by Tom E. Huff