If you’re fond of reading medical thrillers, you’ve probably come across the names of the leading practitioners of the craft. Tess Gerritsen, for example, author of The Surgeon. Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain). Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta series....
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Veterans of intelligence agencies and the special forces crowd the ranks of spy novelists. Some have rightfully been hailed as masters of the craft—John le Carré, for example. Or, more recently, David McCloskey. Others have written worthy and suspenseful novels that illuminate the world of...
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In the long, tense years of the Cold War, spy stories and films about the rivalry between East and West appeared in such profusion that the genre degenerated into self-parody, eventually giving birth to bawdy satires. There were exceptions, of course, notably in the work of John le Carré, Graham...
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Check out your favorite writers of mysteries and thrillers whose careers began after, say, 1970. You’re likely to find that several turn to the work of John D. MacDonald as a model of the craft. In his time—the 1940s through the 1980s—he was one of the world’s most admired and...
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Over the past quarter-century, the award-winning thriller author Dan Fesperman has captivated readers with fourteen novels. Most involve espionage. But they don’t resemble the run-of-the-mill spy stories of cat-and-mouse games between the KGB and the CIA or MI6, much less the superhero tales...
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When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think “Normandy.” After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces. Not to...
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Mick Mulligan “went to meetings with Communists and ate lunch with Communists. He agreed with Communists on certain things.” And that got him fired from his job as a cartoonist and animator at the Disney studio. Which won him a place on the Hollywood blacklist. Which in turn brought...
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Kiran Bedi became India’s first female police officer in 1972 and distinguished herself in a 35-year career. But the Anglo-Indian mystery author Vaseem Khan instead imagined that someone like her had joined the Bombay police two decades earlier. In five suspenseful historical detective...
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In one of his numerous popular legal thrillers set in the American South, John Grisham brings his considerable capacity for anger to bear on Big Coal in Appalachia. There, he zeroes in on the twin tragedies of strip mining and black lung disease. Grisham really, really doesn’t like big...
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Nineteen seventeen was a watershed year in world history. It marked the arrival of the first American troops on the Western Front in World War I, laying the groundwork for victory the following year. The dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian Empires would soon follow....
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Someone has dumped the body of a young woman outside an acute-care hospital in west Los Angeles. There’s nothing on the corpse to identify the woman. But her fingerprints are on file from a background check where she worked. She’s “Marissa Adrianne French, twenty-five years old,...
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If you’re the sort of person who worries a lot, as I am, there’s no end of fodder today for your troubled brain. Climate change. The threat of nuclear war. A new pandemic. The end of democracy. And so many other grim possibilities. But, chances are, you’re not worried about toxic...
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We first met Gabriel Dax in William Boyd’s 2024 novel, Gabriel’s Moon. Then, the itinerant travel-writer-turned-MI6-agent became ensnared in the intrigue surrounding the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister in the Democratic Republic of the Congo....
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For several years, I’ve luxuriated in the rich period details in the Wyndham and Banerjee series of historical detective novels set in 1920s Calcutta. The Anglo-Indian author Abir Mukherjee does a masterful job of blending superior suspense fiction with an historical setting solidly grounded...
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Our society’s relentless push for progress sometimes blinds us to what the past has to offer. And for many American readers that means spurning great books written decades (or centuries) ago in favor of the newest bestseller. Of course, that’s often a mistake. And again and again...
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When the Soviet Union collapsed the day after Christmas in 1991, security officials in the West faced a new nuclear nightmare. Tons of nuclear fuel had accumulated in the country’s far-flung reactors and military bases—and some of that fuel might make its way to terrorists, sold by...
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When we first met Simon Sharman in Charles Beaumont’s explosive debut, A Spy Alone, he was a former MI6 officer employed at a private British intelligence service. Working in tandem with an Oxford academic named Sarah du Cane, who was influential at 10 Downing Street, he exposed a high-level...
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Britain was nearing the peak of its imperial power in the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign as the turn of the 20th century approached. But all was not well in the Empire. Clamor for local control was rising in India, the “Jewel in the Crown,” as the decade-old Indian...
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Truth to tell, I don’t know whether the 26 books I’ve listed below are, in fact, the “best” books of the year 2025. All I know is that they’re the best books I’ve read and reviewed during the past 12 months. In fact, a few of them were published in earlier years. I just didn’t discover them until...
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Over the course of three decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, a Boston-area professor of English named Harry Kemelman published a series of 12 crime novels featuring a young rabbi working as an amateur sleuth. But Rabbi David Small is no run-of-the-mill religious leader. He’s a scholarly Jew...
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...includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
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.