It's tempting to think that there's something in the air in Ireland that would move Irish writers to conjure up such thoughts as this in the musings of a Dublin coroner when meeting an old friend in the police: "they were a pair, no doubt of that, though what they were a pair of, he wasn't sure."...

Many of the products of the Pentagon's in-house research facility, DARPA, are widely known. The Internet. GPS. The M16 rifle. Agent Orange. Stealth aircraft. What is less widely known and understood is the story of the scores of scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats who sired these and many other...

What can I say about a book that could have been great but isn't? In Entropy, the 31st entry in his long-running series of standalone novels about First Contact with alien intelligence, Australian author Peter Cawdron tells a gripping story about the crash of a private jet deep in the Amazon...

Most of the books about artificial intelligence highlight such things as self-driving cars and facial recognition—the brilliant innovations in hardware and software by the engineers and coders who build the stuff and make it work. They dwell variously on the field's potential and its impact on our...

To uncover the identity of a mole in the CIA, John Wells must go undercover again. A long time earlier, he had spent years with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the time, he was the CIA's only source of first-hand information from the scene. This time, the plan is for him to revert to his...

John le Carré does not like Donald Trump. In fact, the eighty-eight-year-old author might well be described as one of the President's harshest critics on either side of the Atlantic. And, of course, he feels much the same about Brexit (and no doubt about Boris Johnson as well). He's made his views...

When I was growing up in Ohio in the 1950s, one of the biggest stories in the news was the execution of the Soviet atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They had been convicted of helping spirit scientific details about the construction of the atomic bomb from American scientists and engineers...

A review of Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis. @@@@ (4 out of 5). If you’re scratching your head over the financial news from Europe these days and wondering what on earth has been happening in Greece, Ireland, and elsewhere that has everyone, especially the Germans, in a state of panic, Michael Lewis’ tale of “financial-disaster tourism” will make it all clear to you with his customary straight talk, humor, and insight.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Could the CIA under George W. Bush really be as clumsy and ineffectual as Susan Hasler portrays it in Intelligence? The dysfunctional agency she dramatizes is a bureaucracy tied up in knots. Some of them are of its own making. Others are handed down from a White...

A review of Wanna Get Lucky? by Deborah Coonts. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Lucky O’Toole is the chief problem-solver at a top-ranked Las Vegas casino and hotel, where a sequinned semblance of life goes on frenetically 24/7. This is a funny, sexy, well-plotted, and well written crime novel that promises a lot of fun in the episodes to come.