From 1964 to 1985 a World War II veteran officer and Harvard MBA named John D. MacDonald published a series of 21 remarkable short crime novels centered on a “Florida beach bum” named Travis McGee. Travis, of course, was MacDonald’s alter ego, with an incisive mind, a head for...
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Three big things happened in America in March 1933. On the fourth day of the month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office as President. He immediately declared a national banking holiday, temporarily closing every bank in the US and freezing financial transactions. And on March 10, a...
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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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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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When Belinda Bauer won the top British award for crime fiction for her debut novel, she told a reporter she was surprised the Crime Writer’s Association considered it a crime novel. It wasn’t a whodunit, after all. Only three or four years later, after several later novels, did she...
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Most crime fiction is formulaic and often entirely predictable. Whodunits. Locked-room mysteries. Legal thrillers. Caper stories. Psychological thrillers. There’s no end of these books. And if they conform to your taste you can probably spend a lifetime immersed in them. But if you crave...
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Joseph Wambaugh, who recently passed away at the age of 88, wrote both novels and nonfiction about police and crime in Los Angeles for more than 50 years. While still at work as an LAPD detective sergeant in 1971, he wrote his first novel, The New Centurions. Two years later I read The Onion...
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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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As Ken Follett notes in an introduction, “This book was written in 1976, immediately before Eye of the Needle, and I think it is the best of my unsuccessful books.” Of course, as everyone who reads thrillers must be aware, Eye of the Needle was a publishing sensation, becoming one of...
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Since Intruder in the Dust (1948) by William Faulkner and James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) pioneered the genre, Southern noir has attracted a wide following. Scores of other authors have rushed to create works that evoke the grim atmospherics of the rural American South. But in recent years...
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Adrian Gyle has been working with little distinction or reward as a reporter in Hong Kong for more than twenty years. He had “arrived in Hong Kong just after the Handover, knowing nobody except my old university friend Jimmy Tang.” He and Jimmy, a notorious womanizer, had been...
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Corruption rises to the top in India. Forty percent of sitting MPs in the Lok Sabha, India’s Parliament, have criminal records, according to a study reported in The Wire in May 2023. Of them, 25 percent faced charges of serious crimes including murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping, rape,...
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Robert Goddard writes suspenseful crime thrillers that typically span many years of British history. Invariably, they demonstrate graphically the unforeseen consequences of long-ago acts. Long Time Coming is one of the 31 novels he has written since the 1980s. It’s a thriller that reveals...
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You’re not likely to find yourself laughing out loud in a typical story about murder. Oh, there are those authors who set out to write crime novels with a smile or a chuckle on every page. Carl Hiaasen or Janet Evanovich, for example. But Parini Shroff doesn’t write like that. Though...
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You can depend on three things when you pick up any one of the first seven books in the Junior Bender series. They’re action-packed, full of surprises, and often hilarious as well. But that’s not the case with the eighth in the series, Rock of Ages. Oh, it’s funny from time to...
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Don’t pick up John Grisham’s latest book expecting another novel in the ongoing saga of Jake Brigance, even though it’s described as the fourth in that series. Sparring Partners is a collection of three unrelated novellas that probe John Grisham’s favorite theme: lawyers...
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The Palestine Quartet by Welsh journalist Matt Rees skillfully explores the dynamics of Palestinian and Israeli society during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). In four novels published from 2007 to 2010, Rees plumbs the depths of the conflict that roiled the tiny Mediterranean land, with echoes...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June.” So opens Colson Whitehead’s glorious recreation of the sights and sounds of the early 1960s in New York City. Grounded in Harlem, his crime novel offers up a colorful view of...
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Even if you’re not a mother, this novel is likely to grab you from the outset. “It’s a widely known fact that most moms are ready to kill someone by eight thirty A.M. on any given morning.” So muses Finlay Donovan—divorced mother of two, hack author of murder mysteries,...
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Then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, brought to light a historical reality that few at the time had thought much about. Fewer than ten million out of 180 million Americans were foreign-born then. But by 1990, following the generous Immigration Act of 1965, that...
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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.