A respected Indian attorney — an idealistic crusader for justice in the face of a corrupt system — has been framed in a sensational murder case and turns for help to the legendary Vish Puri. Depending on the mood he’s in, Vish Puri is either India’s #1 private investigator or #2. Puri is the proprietor […]
Continue Reading...Aristocratic Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley returns to the land of the living, and the mingled comforts and frustrations of his familiar collaborators, in This Body of Death, the 16th novel in Elizabeth George‘s extended study of Lynley’s life. Still reeling from the senseless murder of his wife, Lady Helen Clyde, Lynley is grasping for […]
Continue Reading...Consider this cast of characters: a burned-out 37-year-old retired software millionaire, a gorgeous art gallery owner with a taste for retired software millionaires, a sleazy professor of art, a divorced and self-pitying banker facing up to the emptiness of his life, a bitter young art student with an extraordinary talent for artistic mimicry, a cynical […]
Continue Reading...Both U.S. critics and the British public seem to love Philip Kerr, but I can’t quite figure out why. Oh, Kerr’s good, all right. I can understand why they like him. It’s just that love seems a little over the top. Kerr’s plotting is complex and full of tension and ultimate surprise, and his characters […]
Continue Reading...Robert Goddard writes suspenseful novels that typically span many years in British history and demonstrate graphically the unforeseen consequences of long-ago acts. Long Time Coming is one of the 20 books he has written since the early 90s and one of 12 now available for the Kindle. I acquired an addiction for Goddard’s work six […]
Continue Reading...Ben Collier, born Reuben Kohler, a German-American Jew raised in the film industry by his famous director father, leaves Germany in the days immediately following the end of the Second World War in Europe to visit his brother Danny, who lies in a coma in a Hollywood hospital. There, he finds himself embroiled in complex […]
Continue Reading...Before Stieg Larsson and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, there was Henning Mankell, the long-reigning Swedish king of crime fiction with his internationally popular series of detective novels featuring the world-weary policeman, Kurt Wallander. With The Man From Beijing, Mankell has reclaimed his right to the summit. The first volume of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, […]
Continue Reading...It’s 1840. A eunuch in service to the Ottoman sultan is, improbably, an accomplished detective, a gifted hand-to-hand fighter, and even a lover of women (or, at least, one woman) in this fanciful but flawed mystery story. Dr. Watson to Yashim’s Sherlock Holmes is a Polish Count ejected from his lands by the Austrians in […]
Continue Reading...In three suspenseful crime novels set in England between the two wars, South African writer Rennie Airth tells the story of Scotland Yard detective John Madden and his wife, nee Dr. Helen Blackwell. John is a veteran of the Great War, unhinged by his experiences in the bloodbath in France and by the deaths of […]
Continue Reading...Joseph Wambaugh, who is pushing 75 now, has been acclaimed as a writer of both novels and nonfiction about police and crime in Los Angeles for nearly 40 years. While still at work as a detective sergeant in 1971, his first novel, The New Centurions, was published. It was nearly that long ago (1973) when […]
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