Most crime fiction is formulaic and often entirely predictable. Whodunits. Locked-room mysteries. Legal thrillers. Caper stories. Psychological thrillers. There’s no end of these books. And if they conform to your taste you can probably spend a lifetime immersed in them. But if you crave...
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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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John Sandford has been writing bestselling crime novels since 1989. Three dozen chronicle the amazing career of Lucas Davenport in law enforcement, a tech millionaire who began on the Minneapolis police, continued as a top executive in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and then moved...
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Dan Fesperman’s new spy novel, Pariah, might begin, “A comedian walks into a bar.” Except that the comedian, a popular movie star, is already drinking himself into a stupor in a bar on the Caribbean hideaway of Vieques Island. Then three officers of the Central Intelligence...
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Since the publication in 1981 of Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith has traced the evolution of the country then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the time of Leonid Brezhnev to its current state under Vladimir Putin through 11 novels featuring detective Arkady Renko. Now, in the...
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Every year or two the novelist Joseph Finder releases a new spy thriller. Many of his books treat industrial espionage, others the more familiar themes of international intrigue. Now, in his 19th novel, The Oligarch’s Daughter, Finder returns to the high-stakes game pitting Russian...
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Joseph Wambaugh, who recently passed away at the age of 88, wrote both novels and nonfiction about police and crime in Los Angeles for more than 50 years. While still at work as an LAPD detective sergeant in 1971, he wrote his first novel, The New Centurions. Two years later I read The Onion...
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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,...
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Mara Coyne is a non-practicing lawyer who specializes in recovering stolen art. Her firm consists of her business partner, a former director of the FBI Art Crime Unit we know only as Joe, and a handful of art historians and technical support staff. But their reputation is global. So it’s no...
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A deranged young man shot John Lennon to death outside the front door in 1980. The Beatle and his wife Yoko Ono were living there in the co-op apartment building called The Dakota. They were not the first, or the last, of the world-famous people who had made the Dakota home. For example, Lauren...
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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Carl Hallman shows up on Lew Archer’s doorstep in the middle of the night. The frantic young man has just escaped from the state mental hospital nearby. He says he left because his brother was trying to keep him locked up even though he was close to being discharged. Carl wants Archer to...
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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...
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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.