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,...
Read MoreHistorical truth is elusive. At best, an historian’s “factual” account may convey the scholarly consensus about events or people in bygone times. How, then, can we gain a reliable sense of what life might have been like in, say, 16th century England or even 1990s China? Only the rarest scholarly...
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Anyone who’s even dimly aware of events in China today understands that the country faces a host of pressing environmental challenges. For example, more than 100 of its cities languish under clouds of lethal air pollution. And “as much as 90% of the country’s groundwater is...
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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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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...
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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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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Four times in the less than 80 years of their joint history, India and Pakistan have gone to war. The first erupted when the ink was barely dry on the Indian Independence Act 1947 that resulted in the Partition of India into the two nations. But the cessation of the shooting war in 1948 left the...
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Western readers of suspense fiction look to the work of 19th century authors Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allen Poe for the origins of the detective novel. But in fact there are antecedents in China preceding the two men’s work by hundreds of years. Ming Dynasty stories appeared based on...
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A review of Victory Square, by Olen Steinhauer. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). The conclusion of Steinhauer’s five-novel cycle of thrillers set in Eastern Europe from 1948 to 1990, from the imposition of Communism to its fall.
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A superb suspense novel set in the USSR, Afghanistan, and the U.S. The third book in a trilogy, Agent 6 concludes the story of Leo Demidov, a hero in World War II and later an agent in Stalin’s secret police.
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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.