London reels from increasingly frantic reports that the French are assembling a massive invasion fleet across the Channel. Officers roam the streets in search of young men to press into service for the army. And, to pay for the impending war, the king has debased the currency again, causing havoc...
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On Friday, December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie vanished from her home in Berkshire. Eleven days later, a banjo player entertaining at the hotel in Harrogate where she was staying recognized her from the photos he’d seen in the extensive press coverage of her disappearance. After all, the story...
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On June 20, 1947, someone using a .30 caliber military M1 carbine pumped several bullets into the notorious mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel through a window of his palatial Beverly Hills home. So died the man who has come down through history as the founder of modern Las...
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Oslo, August 2015. An old woman named Turid chances across an entry in an auctioneer’s booklet. It’s a bracelet with a minimum bid of one hundred thousand kroner, or about $10,000 today. “It is forty-eight years since she last saw her bracelet.” So Turid digs out the old...
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A deranged serial killer haunts the precincts of Tudor London in Revelation, the fourth entry in C. J. Sansom’s series of Matthew Shardlake mysteries. And a fellow barrister at Lincoln’s Inn who is Matthew’s best friend is the first victim to come to light. Enraged, Matthew...
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Matthew Shardlake practices law in London in the shadow of King Henry VIII’s court, and from time to time Thomas Cromwell, the Crown’s chief minister, had drafted him with an unwelcome assignment. But it’s now 1541, and Cromwell is dead. Instead, Archbishop Cranmer, the...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes World War I casts a shadow over Maisie Dobbs’s life throughout the three decades that elapse in Jacqueline Winspear’s bestselling historical fiction series. And the ghosts of that war haunt Maisie and many of those close to her even now, after the...
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Revolutionaries have rarely risen to positions of power in the United States, but Teddy Roosevelt was an exception. Everywhere he went, and every job he took, from the US Civil Service Commission to the New York Police Department to the Navy Department and the White House, he shook the walls to...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When Europeans first reached the Americas five centuries ago, mighty civilizations that dwarfed European nations in wealth and population flourished in the Andes and today’s Mexico. But farther north, only a large mound remained of a single city along the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Kyiv, Ukraine, 1919. Everything is scarce in this city of half a million souls. Food. Water. Electricity. And chaos reigns. Control of the city and its suburbs shifts from week to week among warring factions. The Red Army. The Whites under Denikin. And armed...
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When Red Is Black paints a vivid picture of China in transition. Chief Inspector Chen Cao is an “emerging cadre” in the Chinese Communist Party, a published poet of some renown, and the head of the politically sensitive Special Investigations Squad of the Shanghai Police Bureau. Many...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Over the three-decade period from 1981 to 2009, American crime novelist Stuart Kaminsky wrote a series of sixteen police procedurals that reflected the shifting reality in Russian society. During that time, the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Republic,...
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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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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Aki Ito arrives in Chicago with her family in January 1944 expecting to find her glamorous big sister, Rose, waiting for them. Finally, the family is reuniting after two years in the desert concentration camp of Manzanar. But Rose is missing. And all too soon, Aki...
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During the last ten years of his life (1966-76), Mao Zedong shut down China’s schools and universities, denying an education to a generation. At his urging, millions of Chinese teenagers and young adults turned instead to revolution. They upended life throughout their country in a frenzy of...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Bombay, 1950. Three years after Partition, when intercommunal violence set neighbor against neighbor, leaving festering wounds that would last for generations. To the north and the east, in Punjab and Bengal, the killing frenzy had been greatest. But here in...
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For most Americans and Europeans, the name Fiji conjures up images of golden beaches, lush jungle landscapes, and coconut palms waving in a gentle breeze. But until about a century ago, the island nation was the scene of one of the more distasteful practices of the British Empire. Then, tens of...
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Over 1,200 years of its tumultuous history, sixty-three men and women have ruled England. But no monarch, man or woman, has gained more attention from historians and novelists alike than Henry VIII. After all, whose life could measure up in sheer drama? And whose reign was more consequential for...
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For most Americans, World War II was all about the war in the Pacific and what took place after the Allied invasions of Italy and northern France. But it was, of course, a global war. It lasted at least from 1937, when Japan invaded China, to 1945, when the Red Army occupied Berlin. And a great...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes James McBride won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird. It’s an often-hilarious novel about the abolitionist John Brown’s ill-conceived attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. That act is often...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF 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.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF 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.