A fully satisfying murder mystery set in post-war Europe
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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Category: Mysteries & Thrillers
Travis McGee stumbles into a massive financial fraud
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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Russian police confront diamond smuggling and murder in Siberia
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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Beijing’s smog becomes a sensitive political issue for Inspector Chen
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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A tense medical thriller from a master of the craft
If you’re fond of reading medical thrillers, you’ve probably come across the names of the leading practitioners of the craft. Tess Gerritsen, for example, author of The Surgeon. Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain). Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta series....
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US Special Forces and the CIA collide in Cold War Berlin
Veterans of intelligence agencies and the special forces crowd the ranks of spy novelists. Some have rightfully been hailed as masters of the craft—John le Carré, for example. Or, more recently, David McCloskey. Others have written worthy and suspenseful novels that illuminate the world of...
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Alan Furst explores espionage and the Holocaust in the Balkans
In the long, tense years of the Cold War, spy stories and films about the rivalry between East and West appeared in such profusion that the genre degenerated into self-parody, eventually giving birth to bawdy satires. There were exceptions, of course, notably in the work of John le Carré, Graham...
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Suspense authors look to this classic thriller series as a model
Check out your favorite writers of mysteries and thrillers whose careers began after, say, 1970. You’re likely to find that several turn to the work of John D. MacDonald as a model of the craft. In his time—the 1940s through the 1980s—he was one of the world’s most admired and...
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What this CIA officer saw in Berlin in 1979 got her killed 35 years later.
Over the past quarter-century, the award-winning thriller author Dan Fesperman has captivated readers with fourteen novels. Most involve espionage. But they don’t resemble the run-of-the-mill spy stories of cat-and-mouse games between the KGB and the CIA or MI6, much less the superhero tales...
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Fact vs fiction in the story of an outrageous WWII deception
When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think “Normandy.” After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces. Not to...
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A PI battles witch-hunters, gangsters, and Communists
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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India’s first female detective faces separatist revolutionaries
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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John Grisham vs. Big Coal
In one of his numerous popular legal thrillers set in the American South, John Grisham brings his considerable capacity for anger to bear on Big Coal in Appalachia. There, he zeroes in on the twin tragedies of strip mining and black lung disease. Grisham really, really doesn’t like big...
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Murder in Petrograd on the brink of the Russian Revolution
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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An assassin stalks Los Angeles in this Alex Delaware thriller
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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This eco-thriller will keep you up at night
If you’re the sort of person who worries a lot, as I am, there’s no end of fodder today for your troubled brain. Climate change. The threat of nuclear war. A new pandemic. The end of democracy. And so many other grim possibilities. But, chances are, you’re not worried about toxic...
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Cold War intrigue turns violent. A reluctant MI6 agent is a target.
We first met Gabriel Dax in William Boyd’s 2024 novel, Gabriel’s Moon. Then, the itinerant travel-writer-turned-MI6-agent became ensnared in the intrigue surrounding the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister in the Democratic Republic of the Congo....
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An FBI agent struggles to unravel the worst terrorist attack since 9/11
For several years, I’ve luxuriated in the rich period details in the Wyndham and Banerjee series of historical detective novels set in 1920s Calcutta. The Anglo-Indian author Abir Mukherjee does a masterful job of blending superior suspense fiction with an historical setting solidly grounded...
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An outstanding classic thriller that resonates today
Our society’s relentless push for progress sometimes blinds us to what the past has to offer. And for many American readers that means spurning great books written decades (or centuries) ago in favor of the newest bestseller. Of course, that’s often a mistake. And again and again...
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When nuclear smuggling threatened the West
When the Soviet Union collapsed the day after Christmas in 1991, security officials in the West faced a new nuclear nightmare. Tons of nuclear fuel had accumulated in the country’s far-flung reactors and military bases—and some of that fuel might make its way to terrorists, sold by...
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