When C. J. Sansom died early last year at the age of 71, he left behind a series of seven outstanding historical novels set in the time of Henry VIII. Illness prevented him from continuing the series during the final years of his life. Otherwise, we might have followed his uniquely insightful mind...
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When Americans think of World War I, we conjure up images of trench warfare on the Western Front. But the conflict was, of course, global. Most of the fighting took place in Europe and the Middle East. But Germans clashed with Allied forces in Africa, China, Siberia, off the coasts of North and...
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Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv is no stranger to violence. Today the city’s three million residents are subject to random attacks by Russian drones and missiles. But Kyiv was a battleground in World War II. From 1941 to 1943, the capital’s population shrank from 930,000 to 70,000...
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Carl Hallman shows up on Lew Archer’s doorstep in the middle of the night. The frantic young man has just escaped from the state mental hospital nearby. He says he left because his brother was trying to keep him locked up even though he was close to being discharged. Carl wants Archer to...
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Diana Framji grew up wealthy in a mansion on Bombay’s exclusive Malabar Hill, the daughter of a prominent Parsi family. Destined to wed within the confined limits of their tiny minority community, she fell in love instead with a soldier and married him. Captain James Agnihotri, late of the...
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Carl Opgard is the King of Os, a village of a thousand souls in the Norwegian mountains. He owns the Michelin-starred hotel and spa that dominates the community. And his older brother, Roy, isn’t doing so badly, either. He owns the gas station and convenience store, an auto-repair garage,...
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Between 2010 and 2015, dozens of items of precious Chinese art and antiquities disappeared from European museums. They were among the estimated ten million artifacts stolen from China during its century of humiliation from the first Opium War (1839–42) through the Japanese invasion of mainland...
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When we first meet Alex Matthews, he is on an errand for his old friend, the CIA Director. Matthews had once served as Moscow Station Chief. Now, having left the Agency nine years earlier, he is in Moscow running an investment firm. But this night he is on his way to meet BYRON, a spy he’d...
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Version 1.0.0 Start with a devout Buddhist detective in Bangkok named Sonchai Jitpleecheep. He’s half-American, half-Thai, the son of a prostitute now retired to running a red light district bordello. Add a rich and famous Hollywood director murdered in a perverted and mysterious manner....
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The title of this African whodunit implies it. The cover illustration for my Kindle edition of Death by His Grace underlines the hint. And there’s a lot of evidence to suggest it. But is it true? Is multimillionaire Bishop Clem Howard-Mills of the Power of God Ministry Church the heartless...
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright is equally adept at both fiction and nonfiction, for which he won the prize. He has explored the history of Al Qaeda and 9/11, the so-called “Church” of Scientology, and other themes in 11 deeply researched factual accounts published from 1979 to...
Read MoreThe late C. J. Sansom wrote a series of seven outstanding mysteries set in Tudor England before his untimely death in 2024. His protagonist, a resourceful lawyer named Matthew Shardlake, has the misfortune of gaining the attention of the most powerful lords in the land, including King Henry VIII...
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Mao Zedong is one of a handful of people whose image overshadows a broad swath of 20th century affairs. Lenin. Stalin. Churchill. Roosevelt. Yet we Americans know relatively little about the man. For example, Amazon lists ten times the number of biographies of both Winston Churchill and Franklin...
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Ex-spies have written a lot of the very best espionage novels. John le Carré, of course. John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps). Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal). Jason Matthews (Red Sparrow). Charles McCarry (The Miernik Dossier). Alma Katsu (Red Widow). David McCloskey (Damascus Station)....
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Midway through the 12th century, less than 90 years since the Norman Conquest, England’s first civil war drew to a close when the exhausted warring parties reached a shaky agreement. King Stephen was aging, and he accepted as his successor the young son of his adversary, variously known as...
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With The Holy Thief, William Ryan joins Martin Cruz Smith (the Arkady Renko series) and Tom Rob Smith (the Child 44 Trilogy), whose compelling crime novels have illuminated the dark recesses of Stalin’s USSR. However, Ryan’s new contribution is set not in the 1950s, the 80s, or more...
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Jonathan Kellerman’s series of Alex Delaware mysteries debuted in 1985. Book number 40 appeared in 2025, making the series one of the longest-running in the genre—and no wonder. His protagonist, Dr. Alex Delaware, is a child psychologist like the author himself, privy to a lifetime of case...
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She was Graham Greene and Eric Ambler’s contemporary, and all her nearly two dozen spy novels were bestsellers. (Four were adapted to film: Above Suspicion, Assignment in Brittany, The Venetian Affair, and The Salzburg Connection.) In books that appeared from 1941 to 1984, Helen MacInnes...
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What’s your experience when you re-read a novel you loved when you were much younger? Mine is mixed. As often as not, I discover either that the book reflects concerns of mine in a long-past life or that the style comes across as archaic. Very few stories hold up well a century later—even...
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Murder mysteries predominate among the countless novels of suspense that crowd the shelves in bookstores and libraries. The stakes are obvious when a murder takes place. Someone has snuffed out a human life. By contrast, a crime such as counterfeiting represents a lower order of threat—or at...
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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.