Adolf Hitler has been chancellor of Germany for only four weeks, when on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag—home of the parliament in Berlin—suddenly bursts into flames. The Nazis promptly blame unruly communists, and in response suspend civil liberties throughout the country. Caught up in the ensuing escalation of lies, divisiveness, and bigotry is John Russell, …
Published originally in 1932, and said to be the first detective novel by an African-American author, this witty, shrewdly plotted whodunit (recently reissued) was penned by Rudolph Fisher, a New York City radiographer, short-story writer, and musician, active in the Harlem Renaissance. It tosses us onto the hectic scene of a nighttime slaying, the victim …
Fifty years after publishing his first novel—the wonderful Wobble to Death, about murder during a Victorian race walking competition—British author Lovesey returns to the sports world in this 19th mystery starring Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond. In the run-up to Bath, England’s spring half-marathon, we’re introduced to Maeve Kelly, a usually non-athletic schoolteacher, who’s training for this …
Edwards, an expert on Golden Age mystery fiction, delivers here a fast-clip work of psychological suspense set during the Great Depression. It imagines Jacob Flint, an oft-rash junior crime reporter for London’s Clarion newspaper, chancing upon what he sees as a scoop in Rachel Savernake, the bewitching, wealthy daughter of a notorious hanging judge, who’s …
“I wanted people to get a good laugh out of it,” le Carré says of his new, 25th novel. Maybe I’m the wrong kind of reader; I didn’t chuckle even once, but I still enjoyed this meticulously crafted spy novel suffused with politics of all sorts. Protagonist Anatoly—“Nat” for short—is a middle-aged veteran of Britain’s …
