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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Try to imagine what might happen if a huge asteroid were heading straight for Earth and nothing could stop it. The human race would be annihilated. Do you think for a minute that people would just continue living their lives and content themselves with wishful thinking and prayer? Or would the...
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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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Our society’s relentless push for progress sometimes blinds us to what the past has to offer. And for many American readers that means spurning great books written decades (or centuries) ago in favor of the newest bestseller. Of course, that’s often a mistake. And again and again...
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When the Soviet Union collapsed the day after Christmas in 1991, security officials in the West faced a new nuclear nightmare. Tons of nuclear fuel had accumulated in the country’s far-flung reactors and military bases—and some of that fuel might make its way to terrorists, sold by...
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Britain was nearing the peak of its imperial power in the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign as the turn of the 20th century approached. But all was not well in the Empire. Clamor for local control was rising in India, the “Jewel in the Crown,” as the decade-old Indian...
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Truth to tell, I don’t know whether the 26 books I’ve listed below are, in fact, the “best” books of the year 2025. All I know is that they’re the best books I’ve read and reviewed during the past 12 months. In fact, a few of them were published in earlier years. I just didn’t discover them until...
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Truth to tell, I don’t know whether the 26 books I’ve listed below are, in fact, the “best” books of the year 2025. All I know is that they’re the best books I’ve read and reviewed during the past 12 months. In fact, a few of them were published in earlier years. I just didn’t discover them until...
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Over the course of three decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, a Boston-area professor of English named Harry Kemelman published a series of 12 crime novels featuring a young rabbi working as an amateur sleuth. But Rabbi David Small is no run-of-the-mill religious leader. He’s a scholarly Jew...
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If you’ve read The Prince, you probably think you know the work of Niccolo Machiavelli. Chances are, you think of him—as I always did—as the Renaissance propagandist who lionized a lying, cheating, brutal scoundrel as the ideal political and military leader. Having read The Malice of...
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When Belinda Bauer won the top British award for crime fiction for her debut novel, she told a reporter she was surprised the Crime Writer’s Association considered it a crime novel. It wasn’t a whodunit, after all. Only three or four years later, after several later novels, did she...
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Captain Sam Wyndham, late of the Western Front in World War I, had made powerful enemies in the Imperial Police in Calcutta, where he transferred after the war. Perhaps he was too honest, or too thorough. But when he helped his sergeant, Surendranath Banerjee, to flee India when falsely accused of...
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Homicide detective Chen Cao has risen to the formidable posts of Chief Inspector, head of the Special Investigations Squad, and Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party in the Shanghai Police Bureau. Inspector Chen is that rarity in Chinese law enforcement: an honest man who seeks only the truth,...
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For the West, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 signaled a welcome shift in global power dynamics. Americans celebrated it as the end of the Cold War and a victory for the hardliner Ronald Reagan. But for the 289 million people of the USSR, the eruption of hope that came with the shift soon...
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A dismembered corpse turns up in the vault of a London silver shop, missing its eyes, hands, feet, and penis. A Masonic sash is tied around the body and a Masonic “G” carved into its back. Also, the shop, Ramsay Silver, specializes in silver items bearing Masonic symbols. However,...
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Work began on the Trans-Siberian Railway on March 9, 1891. Then, Tsar Alexander III still ruled the Russian Empire. But when he died at the age of 49 three years later, his feckless son Nicholas II ascended to the Imperial Throne. And at immense expense, Nicholas realized his father’s dream...
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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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England’s Tudor Dynasty (1485-1603) encompassed the reign of five monarchs. But just three of them ruled for a combined total of more than a century: Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509), Henry VIII (1509-47), and Elizabeth I (1558–1603) They ushered in unprecedented change in England’s fortunes,...
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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.