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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
To the surprise of Russia and everyone, the Ukraine war has taken a remarkable turn in the last few weeks. Initially, the Ukrainians did well by just surviving. Then, they began a slow, systematic counter-offensive…
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…