Crash and Burn opens straightforwardly enough with an automobile tumbling down a hillside in northern New Hampshire, nearly killing Nicole Frank, the intoxicated woman driver. But as the story unfolds, it turns out to be anything but straightforward. Frank sets police off on an intensive,...
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Back in the 1960s, when I began reading in earnest beyond the boundaries of textbooks and science fiction, novels characterized by critics as “black humor” were popular, and I ate them up. (That’s black as in dark or cynical, gallows humor, not African-American.) This was the...
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When I was a child, I was addicted to science fiction. Many of the novels I read then rhapsodized about human settlements on Mars, the moons of the outer planets, and among the stars beyond. That fantasy morphed into an expectation as the Apollo Project achieved its seemingly impossible dream of...
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Ben Ellison is a Boston patent lawyer who is a former CIA agent who had lost his first wife to an explosion engineered by the KGB. He possesses an eidetic memory and, after an unusually powerful MRI, the ability to read minds — and, yes, through his second wife, he is now the son-in-law of...
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Here’s a story that could have been worked into a terrific novel in the hands of a writer with a trifle of self-restraint. Unfortunately, Yasmina Khadra, reputedly one of Africa’s greatest writers, displays none of that. Every one of his characters, from a German physician to a passel...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.