Here’s a story that only a gifted writer could successfully pull off. The key figures could hardly figure as principals in anyone else’s novels. The rootless young men in a depressed small town who’ve formed a would-be right-wing militia. Four Russian biological warfare...
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High up on an isolated lane near the border of Beverly Hills a maintenance man encounters four dead bodies in a limousine. It’s parked outside a crumbling old mansion often used for exclusive parties. His call to the police brings homicide Detective Lieutenant Milo Sturgis to the scene. He...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...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.