Catholicism is a faith rooted in the senses.  It is the smell of incense, the music of chant, the bright brilliance of stained-glass windows, the feel of chrism on the [...]

In the preface to their 2001 Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution, James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg describe their book in several ways. They write that it is [...]

The words aren’t there on the cover of Postscripts (or Just Desserts), but they jumped out at me when I turned to the title page: “Some Final Scribblings.” That’s not [...]

There is something very British about Ben Macintyre's "Operation Mincemeat," detailing the plot to deceive Nazi Germany about the plans of the Allies to invade Sicily at a key moment [...]

It may seem odd, but there are a surprising number of poets who have also cranked out mysteries, and vice versa. Edgar Allan Poe, of course, is known for his [...]

If ever there were a trigger warning needed, it’s the one for David Scott Hay’s new novel [NSFW] which cautions the reader that the novel includes “sex, drug use, witchcraft, [...]

Andre Norton was at the very start of her career as a novelist in the early 1950s.  By the time of her death in 2005 at the age of 93, [...]

Odysseus’s episode inside the cave of the cyclops Polyphemos plays an outsize role in Tad Crawford’s On Wine-Dark Seas: A Novel of Odysseus and His Fatherless Son Telemachus. Telemachus, the [...]

There is an elegiac quality to Kathleen Naureckas’s 2012 poetry chapbook For the Duration. The title is a reference to the phrase she remembered in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, during World [...]

Relatively early in Christopher Moore’s heartwarming tale of Christmas terror titled The Stupidest Angel, he notes: According to the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you had [...]