For years, Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau had been widely celebrated as a “rising cadre” in the Communist Party. He was a man on his way up, rumored to soon be tapped as the Bureau’s Party Secretary. But his success has undone him. Chen has exposed too...
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As a rule, I’m no fan of serial killer stories. The phenomenon is rare and heavily overused by authors of mystery novels. But author Patrice McDonough brings a new perspective to the genre with her riveting Victorian police procedural, Murder by Lamplight. It’s the first of a series of...
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Before his death in 2009, the prolific detective novelist Stuart Kaminsky wrote 16 police procedurals featuring a Moscow investigator named Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. The books span the years 1981 to 2008. They encompass the final years of Communist rule and the first two tumultuous decades that...
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The American motion picture industry, which we know as “Hollywood,” began in the early 1910s when filmmakers migrated to California. By 1915, they had established a global cinema hub. But filmmaking grew early in India, too. The first Hndi-language feature film produced there,...
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A review of The Bridge of Sighs, by Olen Steinhauer. It’s a deeply satisfying novel that matches complex characters with a credible story in a well-researched setting.
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The independence of Chief Inspector Rostnikov’s cozy little squad is on the line. “The Office of Special Investigations was at the very bottom of the Moscow police force. The Office had been created solely as a receptacle in which to dump unsolvable and politically sensitive cases...
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Through the rapidly industrializing nations of eastern and southern Asia, air pollution has become a major issue. For example, air pollution in India is estimated to kill some two million people a year. It’s most intense in Delhi, the capital. And when Xi Jinping took the reins of the...
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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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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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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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Next to William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie was the bestselling author of all time. Not even J. K. Rowling, Danielle Steele, or James Patterson come even remotely close. So it’s a fair bet that, if you read mysteries, you’re likely to be aware she disappeared for 11 days in December...
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Captain Sam Wyndham, late of the Western Front in World War I, had made powerful enemies in the Imperial Police in Calcutta, where he transferred after the war. Perhaps he was too honest, or too thorough. But when he helped his sergeant, Surendranath Banerjee, to flee India when falsely accused of...
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Homicide detective Chen Cao has risen to the formidable posts of Chief Inspector, head of the Special Investigations Squad, and Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party in the Shanghai Police Bureau. Inspector Chen is that rarity in Chinese law enforcement: an honest man who seeks only the truth,...
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Work began on the Trans-Siberian Railway on March 9, 1891. Then, Tsar Alexander III still ruled the Russian Empire. But when he died at the age of 49 three years later, his feckless son Nicholas II ascended to the Imperial Throne. And at immense expense, Nicholas realized his father’s dream...
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Beginning with Death of a Red Heroine in 2000, the Chinese American author Qiu Xiaolong inaugurated a series of Chinese detective novels now 13 strong and counting. I regard these books as the very best Chinese detective novels I’ve read. Qiu is a poet, translator, critic, and former...
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During the year 1948 American history took a sharp turn into the future. The Soviet Union had imposed the Berlin Blockade, triggering the monumental, 11-month Berlin Airlift. Harry Truman won election outright as President, defying the pollsters. The CIA, founded only the year before, was filling...
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From 1986 to 2001, the massive Russian space station Mir (“peace”) hurtled around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, circling the planet approximately every hour and a half. Usually, three cosmonauts lived aboard for periods lasting from several months to over a year. Cosmonaut...
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No large institution is free of corruption. The temptation to gain personal wealth or power is too great for some individuals to ignore. Of course, the incidence of self-dealing may be lower in business organizations engaged in fierce competition. Corruption adds costs that top executives are...
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It’s 1522. An old peddler, known as a chapman in that era, reminisces about the first of the many mysteries he’d investigated over the years. Traveling a half-century into the past to Bristol, he muses about leaving the Benedictine monastery where he was a novice to become a chapman,...
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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.