I admit it: I’m a latecomer to this party. Michael Connelly is an enormously successful writer and his series about Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch is his best-known work. But it’s…Read more…

If Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about cardboard boxes, I would buy it. He could write about paint drying and make it interesting. I think every non-fiction author wants to grow up to be Malcolm…Read more…

Anyone who read through all the previous 11 Erast Fandorin novels by Boris Akunin has been waiting for this moment. Those novels chart the career of the master detective during the final decades of…Read more…

What a long title for such a short book! A short book – but not an easy one. Ahrens is clearly an academic and this heavily footnoted book, full of citations and references, actually tells…Read more…

The author of this brand new London-based thriller is honest enough to tell readers — in the Acknowledgments — of her debt to the book Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, which was made…Read more…

Veteran author Lawrence Block has pulled together 17 of the best short story writers around today and given each one an Edward Hopper painting — that’s the idea. And it works…Read more…

I just learned what ‘flash fiction’ is this week – and this is the first anthology of flash fiction that I’ve read. If this is any indication of how good very short stories…Read more…

Flash fiction – stories of up to 1,000 words – is a new way of writing, and one that sounds quite appealing. Nancy Stohlman’s book is a short (as you’d expect) introduction to…Read more…

Master story-teller Val McDermid here presents a dozen short stories all loosely connected to the Christmas holiday season. The first one features her well-known crime-fighting duo, Dr. Tony Hill and…Read more…

As a fan of Mark Billingham’s crime novels featuring Tom Thorne, I had high hopes for this very short collection of three stories. I was not disappointed. All three are good, and at least one…Read more…

Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, written on the eve of the Second World War, told the story of a British big game hunter who decided on his own to shoot and kill an un-named European…Read more…

Despite the title, this is not a book about war, but about friendship. It tells the simple story of four men serving in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, but has almost no…Read more…

This book is a masterpiece – and not the only masterpiece that John le Carré ever wrote. Read it now, and then think about all the other books about British spies you’ve ever read. Le…Read more…

For anyone looking for a version of Gone Girl set in North London, this is not the book for you. Or maybe it is — the first half, I mean. Because this a clever book…Read more…

This book, written in 1955, is essential reading today for anyone interested in democratic socialism. Democratic Socialists of America, one of the successor organizations of the Socialist Party, is…Read more…

As someone who both writes and publishes books, I was keen to read a well-reviewed, short text aimed at people like myself. I was not disappointed. This is a clear, well-written introduction to the…Read more…

Let me begin by saying that Major L H Manderstam is not someone I’d want to invite over for dinner. This memoir, published in 1985 shortly after the author’s death, is full of obnoxious…Read more…

This is a brilliant book and I encourage all my non-Jewish friends to read it. My Jewish friends will not need to read it because what Baddiel writes — and he writes really well —…Read more…

Nearly twenty years ago, science journalist Gary Taubes wrote an article for the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times reporting that some eminent scientists were beginning to re-think the…Read more…

According to author Mark Felton, the people put in charge of keeping Adolf Hitler safe and well actually created the modern practice of body-guarding, sometimes known as ‘close…Read more…