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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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 More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
A review of The Fear Index, by Robert Harris. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Set in Geneva, this taut thriller takes the reader into the world of a brilliant American scientist, Dr. Alexander Hoffman, who has developed mathetical formulas that make billions in profits for his hedge fund.
Read More
Ben Collier, born Reuben Kohler, is a German-American Jew raised in the film industry by his famous director father. He 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...
Read More
One of the greatest crimes committed by the fascist regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was to steal babies from leftist parents and sell them to affluent conservative families. And the practice went on even long after Franco’s death in 1975. At least 50,000 babies were trafficked...
Read More
Finding the truth behind a smokescreen of lies in Washington DC isn’t just a challenge for crack investigator Peter Rena. It’s downright dangerous. But when the President of the United States asks you to take on a job, you don’t say no, no matter what your misgivings. And this...
Read More
Ken Follett traced the construction of a great medieval cathedral from the 11th to the 16th centuries in his monumental, four-book Kingsbridge series. In the Century Trilogy, he turned to the history of the two 20th-century world wars and the Depression between them. Now he explores the question...
Read More
Secretary of State Ellen Adams loathes her boss, and the feeling is mutual. She’s convinced he had named her to the post only to find a way to destroy her reputation. And when he torpedoes a vital diplomatic mission to Korea that is intensely embarrassing to her, she knows she’s right....
Read More
...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.