Before there was Jack Reacher, there was Travis McGee. Lee Child, who created Reacher, has never been shy about the debt he owes. Neither have Carl Hiaasen, Dean Koontz, and a long list of other bestselling writers. Between 1964 and 1985, John D. MacDonald wrote 21 novels about McGee, a...
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Nazi Germany reportedly dispatched as many as 135 spies to Britain during World War II. And, according to numerous historical accounts, every single one of them was either captured or turned themselves in to authorities. (At least one didn’t fit the pattern, though. He committed suicide...
Read MoreWhy, I keep asking myself, do I continue to read these books about two ladies who operate as private detectives in Gaborone, Botswana? After all, they’re not really detectives. They don’t investigate crime and almost never encounter the police. They “help solve people’s...
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As I write, more than 20 lawsuits have been filed against the company OpenAI over the alleged misbehavior of its chatbot, ChatGPT. (I could find none against Anthropic’s Claude.) Doubtless, more will surface as time goes on, especially in the face of fast-growing reports that AI has hacked...
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For readers in the USA or Europe, it can be a challenge to understand law enforcement policies and procedures in countries grounded in non-Western values and assumptions. In China, for example. The Inspector Chen novels of the Chinese expatriate author Qiu Xiaolong show just how very different...
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Few things pose a greater threat to our peace of mind than the prospect of a terrorist attack with a biological weapon. That theme has powered several high-profile thrillers over recent years, including Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event, Stephen King’s The Stand, and Spasm by Robin...
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In A Deadly Episode, the sixth book in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, Anthony Horowitz delivers a belated sequel to the novel that launched the series, The Word is Murder. And, true to form, he delivers a baffling story with a devilishly clever premise. Yes, Horowitz does it again. The author...
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You can hardly scan the headlines in a newspaper or open a screen to a news program without coming across something about artificial intelligence these days. AI has become a dominant force in technology, science and mathematics, entertainment, and even the economy. But in no field does AI promise...
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To be clear at the outset, you should not expect a realistic picture of small-town crime when you read Justin Halpern’s comic masterpiece, Get Lost. What you’ll get instead is a fiendishly clever story that somehow involves a missing woman, corrupt almond farmers, a Big Box warehouse,...
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What most Americans know about life on the more than 300 Indian reservations comes from the novels of the late Tony Hillerman and his daughter Anne. Dark Winds, the television series based on their novels, contributes, too. But the Navajo Nation in which their stories are set lies on a sprawling...
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Agatha Christie died half a century ago, and her most celebrated works appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet even today hundreds of thousands of readers, and possibly millions, participate in Agatha Christie fan clubs. But why? What can possibly cause so many people to cherish the books she wrote...
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In Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead begins the story of Harlem furniture dealer and part-time fence Ray Carney. Cool Machine concludes the tale in three self-contained but interlocking stories, each set in a different year of the 1980s. Then,...
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The first espionage novels appeared early in the 19th century with the publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy in 1821 and The Bravo in 1831. A few other notable titles were published in the ensuing decades, and Sherlock Holmes got into the act around the turn of the century...
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With such sparse media coverage of events in Africa today, and the short shrift most Western history textbooks give the continent, it’s no wonder Americans have developed a stereotyped view of Africa and Africans. This flies in the face of reality. The continent is vast, encompassing 54...
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Most citations of awards in the mystery, thriller, and suspense field mention the Edgar, Gold Dagger, Anthony, and International Thriller Writer Awards. But the categories used by these four awards don’t match. And as you’ll see, the awards themselves don’t often, either. For example, the Mystery...
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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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A decade ago Anglo-Indian author Abir Mukherjee broke into a second career as a crime novelist after 20 years working as an accountant. His first effort, A Rising Man, appeared in 2016. An historical detective novel featuring a pair of Calcutta cops shortly after World War I, it won a coveted...
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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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Ariel Pryce awakens to a sunny day in Lisbon only to find her new husband, John Wright, missing. After hours waiting for him to turn up, it’s clear something’s amiss. There’s no message, and no sign of him whatsoever. Fearing he’s fallen victim to an accident or been...
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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.