He describes himself as “a whey-faced hunchback lawyer in black robe and cap, a pencase and dagger at my waist instead of a sword.” He is Matthew Shardlake, a sometime favorite of Henry Vill’s first minister, Thomas Cromwell, and this is his story. It’s C. J. Sansom’s...
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Somewhere in the vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of stars and innumerable planets in orbit around them, intelligent life must have arisen. The circumstances of our emergence on Earth are unusual. But it’s hubris of the highest order to insist that they’re...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Sun-drenched beaches. Curvy young brown-skinned women dancing in grass skirts. Gentle, easy-going villagers gliding through the sea in hand-hewn canoes. If this is your image of a South Sea island, you can forget about it. That’s not what you’ll find...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes You might pick up Tina Nguyen’s memoir, The MAGA Diaries, expecting a confessional, a mea culpa. I did. But that’s not the book she wrote. As Nguyen makes clear at the outset, “I never became a true believer and cannot profess to be one.”...
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All too often dystopian fiction paints the future all in black and gray. But Alice Sabo’s inventive Changed World series is full of life and color. After a killer pandemic late in what seems to be the twenty-first century, one community—presumably among many—painstakingly crawls its way back...
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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.