Anthony Horowitz possesses one of the crime genre’s most original minds. He’s proved it over and over again in scores of novels and several long-running television series. But nowhere is his cunning intelligence more in evidence than in The Word is Murder. It’s the first of what...
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Milo Sturgis is not your cookie-cutter homicide detective. He’s gay, for one thing. But there’s more. A lieutenant with the LAPD’s highest close rate, he’s claimed a privileged existence largely insulated from demands by his superiors. Except that this time around an...
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When Tony Hillerman died at the age of 83 in 2008, he left behind an extensive literary legacy that included the 18 books in his award-series of Navajo detective novels. The Leaphorn and Chee books won him plaudits throughout the world and made him a wealthy man. Five years later, his daughter,...
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Leonard Summers; his wife, Martha; and son, Bernard, are moving into a remote cabin in Minnesota. But his name isn’t Leonard Summers. It’s Leonid Sokolov. And “he was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency,” Lucas Davenport explains to fellow US...
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High up on an isolated lane near the border of Beverly Hills a maintenance man encounters four dead bodies in a limousine. It’s parked outside a crumbling old mansion often used for exclusive parties. His call to the police brings homicide Detective Lieutenant Milo Sturgis to the scene. He...
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He calls himself a beach bum. Travis McGee lives on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale and only works when he’s running out of money. Then he becomes a “salvage consultant,” helping someone who’s been robbed blind. He’ll steal back the money or valuables—for half the...
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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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For the West, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 signaled a welcome shift in global power dynamics. Americans celebrated it as the end of the Cold War and a victory for the hardliner Ronald Reagan. But for the 289 million people of the USSR, the eruption of hope that came with the shift soon...
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A dismembered corpse turns up in the vault of a London silver shop, missing its eyes, hands, feet, and penis. A Masonic sash is tied around the body and a Masonic “G” carved into its back. Also, the shop, Ramsay Silver, specializes in silver items bearing Masonic symbols. However,...
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The South African nation of Botswana attracts wildlife tourists and diamond-buyers but little other attention from the outside world. It’s a big place, nearly as large as the state of Texas, but sparsely populated with only about 2.5 million inhabitants. That makes it the size of Greater...
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In a series of 36 crime novels to date, John Sandford has traced the career of crack investigator Lucas Davenport for four decades. Marketed under the “Prey” umbrella, the books follow Davenport from his time in Minnesota, first on the city’s police force, then in a senior role...
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John Sandford has been writing bestselling crime novels since 1989. Three dozen chronicle the amazing career of Lucas Davenport in law enforcement, a tech millionaire who began on the Minneapolis police, continued as a top executive in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and then moved...
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Since the publication in 1981 of Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith has traced the evolution of the country then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the time of Leonid Brezhnev to its current state under Vladimir Putin through 11 novels featuring detective Arkady Renko. Now, in the...
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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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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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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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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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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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Kwei Quartey has shined a bright light on life in contemporary Ghana in the ten mysteries and thrillers he has published to date. In his tenth novel, The Whitewashed Tombs, he writes about the persecution of people who identify as LGBTQ, pointing the finger at a massive nationwide campaign for...
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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.