Here’s a story that will awaken every cynical bone in your body that resonates to the waves of political corruption we see every day in the news. In Girls, Crimes, and the Ruling Body, veteran political operative Barry R. Ziman has written a novel for our time. You have only to glance at the...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright is equally adept at both fiction and nonfiction, for which he won the prize. He has explored the history of Al Qaeda and 9/11, the so-called “Church” of Scientology, and other themes in 11 deeply researched factual accounts published from 1979 to...
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Greenland is the setting for one of the most original novels of suspense I’ve come across in many years. As you may be aware, it’s anything but green. And it’s the world’s largest island, more than one-fifth the size of the United States. But Greenland supports fewer than...
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Here’s a story about power and the violence that sustains it. Violence erupts on the page in Jordan Harper’s thriller, Everybody Knows, from its lede (“Los Angeles burns. Some sicko is torching homeless camps.”) to its inevitable conclusion. And the woman at the center of...
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Over the course of my life four new Popes have been installed by the Catholic Church. Robert Harris’ thriller, Conclave, which was recently released as a motion picture, is about the next election. Set a few years in the future, when a man closely resembling Pope Francis has either retired...
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Cate Castle can’t understand how her brother died. He couldn’t possibly have committed suicide, as both the Egyptian government and Eric’s employer insist. So, against everyone’s advice, she flies to Cairo to investigate. And as she pokes into Polestar, the arms dealer he...
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On June 29, 1995, the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea, suddenly collapsed, the result of structural failure. Five hundred people died, and 900 more suffered injuries. It was the largest peacetime disaster in the history of the country. The details in Hannah Michell’s debut...
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Gravity opens in the Galápagos Rift nineteen thousand feet below the surface of the South Pacific. And it reaches a shattering conclusion two hundred twenty miles above the Earth. The connection between these two events, two years apart, lies at the heart of the mystery in this pulse-pounding...
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People as diverse as Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg, and Paul Hawken, among many others, have advanced scores of ideas about how to address climate change. But is there a single idea that holds the greatest promise of quick, large-scale action? In author Tom Rosenstiel’s fast-moving political...
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On May 26, 2014, Narendra Modi assumed office as Prime Minister, heading up a new right wing Indian government. The 64-year-old bachelor represented a sea change in the country’s politics, shifting India from a secular democracy to an increasingly autocratic Hindu nationalist nation. But none of...
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Readers may know Aya de León as the author of the four books published to date in her Justice Hustlers series of thrillers. Four have appeared to date among her eleven novels. But all her work so far shares an outspoken progressive perspective and highlights an activist approach to today’s...
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Check this out: Two fugitives on the run, intent on the biggest score they’ve ever pulled off. A Mexican cartel. A mammoth Chinese state-owned company. The world’s second largest airport under construction. And the rarest gems ever discovered. They all figure in Daniel Nieh’s...
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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.