The second book in the Cassie Raven series is as good as the first. This time, the Camden-based mortuary worker investigates a cold case even closer to home: her father, jailed for murdering her mother…

This short book is a wonderful resource for writers — both writers of fiction and non-fiction. Unlike so many books about writing, this is not about self-publishing, or setting goals, or grammar, or marketing. Instead,…

Cassie (Cassandra) Raven works in a mortuary in Camden, north London, where she speaks to the dead — and it seems they might be speaking back. This is the first book in a series of…

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the first days of November 1917, socialists everywhere greeted the news with delight. But not Karl Kautsky, the German Social Democrat then widely known as…

I love a good, fast-paced thriller and this book showed a lot of promise. In the opening few pages, the heroine — a woman known as “Jack” — returns home from a dangerous assignment (she…

With those four men listed as the authors, how could this have been such an uninteresting book? It’s the transcript of a debate which took place in Toronto several years ago. Pinker and Ridley made…

Growing up in the Soviet Union, Masha Karp read George Orwell’s novels, and in particular 1984 and Animal Farm and could not understand something. How could someone who never lived in her country, who did…

This is an example of a book with a very good title, but little else. The author appears to have done hardly any research, mostly tells you stuff any writer would know, and the good…

Don’t be put off by the silly title. “Orgasmatron” was an inside joke in Woody Allen’s 1973 film “Sleeper”. And no, Wilhelm Reich did not invent sex (as far as I know). But title aside,…

This very short book is unfortunately not a very good book. If you want to know what Freud thought about things, probably the best place to start is Freud himself. Author Anthony Storr concedes that…