I first came across Tim Spector because of COVID. His company, ZOE, launched an app which I and millions of others used to report daily on symptoms, vaccines, etc. Since then I’ve read one of…Read more…

A dead junkie is found in an Edinburgh squat, the victim of an overdose. To most cops, that’s barely worth a mention. To John Rebus, it looks like a crime. I didn’t love the first…Read more…

This novella (or short story) is the first thing I’ve read by Henry James and it was … interesting. At first the style is a bit heavy, with very long sentences, but over time one…Read more…

This is a superb book – well-written and compelling. It tells the little-known (or little-remembered) story of the relationship between the man known as the ‘Pope of Marxism’ and the Russian revolutionaries. Karl Kautsky was…Read more…

Ian Rankin is universally considered to be one of Britain’s greatest living writers of crime fiction. He has been called “the Scottish Ed McBain”, and as an admirer of McBain’s work, I was keen to…Read more…

What we know about an author affects how we read their books. Ryan Holiday is a young businessman, a college dropout, who lives on a ranch in Texas and writes about things like marketing. Had…Read more…

The 9th book in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series may be the weakest link in the chain so far. The beginning is promising: Detective Steve Carella’s sister is getting married and on the morning of…Read more…

This door-stopper of a book is, first of all, a work of military history. Beevor doesn’t have much to say about the social, political or economic history of that tumultuous period in Russia. But he…Read more…

This, the eighth book in the legendary 87th Precinct series, was written over the course of just nine days, according to author Ed McBain. It’s a concise, tense account of just a few hours in…Read more…

The 7th book in McBain’s groundbreaking series of police procedurals — a genre he basically invented — seems to be having a bit of fun. In previous books, McBain’s introductions and afterwords, written many decades…Read more…

The sixth book of the 87th Precinct series continues the focus on the new detective, Cotton Hawes, who — at least from a 21st century point of view — is turning out to be rather…Read more…

The fifth book in Ed McBain’s classic 87th Precinct series introduces a new character to the detective squad — Cotton Hawes. Hawes has been transferred over from one of the richer parts of the city…Read more…

Warren Lerner’s 1970 biography of Karl Radek may be the only English language biography of this once-famous, now-forgotten Bolshevik leader. Karl Radek, born in 1885 and died in 1939 (possibly) was intensely disliked by most…Read more…

Having failed to kill off Detective Steve Carella in the previous book, the 4th book in the long-running 87th Precinct series has him playing a star role. As in many of McBain’s novels, there are…Read more…

At the time he wrote this in 1920, Karl Radek was a loyal Bolshevik. This short book, like Trotsky’s more famous Terrorism and Communism, was written in rebuttal to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same…Read more…

Even in 1956, when Ed McBain wrote this book, drug addiction was a problem in the United States. Like so many of the books in the 87th precinct series (this is the third), this story…Read more…

This is the second book in McBain’s legendary 87th Precinct series, set in a fictionalised (albeit recognisable) New York City. McBain was experimenting with the idea of a whole team as ‘hero’ of the series…Read more…