I first came across Tim Wohlforth probably around half a century ago. A couple of members of his group stood outside the gates of my high school in Queens, New York. They were chatting with…

Derek Gow has campaigned for years to reintroduce beavers into Britain. The animals were hunted to extinction centuries ago, and the case for reintroducing them is a compelling one. Basically, beavers’ building activities, including damming,…

In the afterword to this book, author David F. Walker provides a rather nuanced view of the Black Panthers, and correctly sums it all up by saying that the conditions that gave birth to the…

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 taken me nearly 30…

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…

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 tsarist…

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…

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 into…

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 exceptionally well, and not…