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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…