In the 1955 novel Murder in the Navy, the killer is an evil presence operating in the shadows.  But he’s not hidden from the reader, even though his name isn’t [...]

I knew ahead of time the solution to the puzzle that Fredric Brown’s on-the-wagon Chicago reporter Bill Sweeney was trying to solve in The Screaming Mimi, and I still found [...]

As I was finishing John Grisham’s 1992 gripping legal thriller The Pelican Brief, I found myself warmly enjoying its reminder of how wonderful newspapering used to be. The novel starts [...]

Robert Ludlum had a knack for writing successful and very popular thrillers, producing 27 books with a total of somewhere between 300 million and 500 million copies in print.  That [...]

Some background:  More than four centuries ago, during the Protestant Reformation, Scottish reformer John Knox published, while exiled in Switzerland, a small 20,000-word book that has kept his name alive [...]

I suspect that Charles Dickens was in a pretty foul mood when he wrote "Hard Times" in 1854. He draws stark differences between the "good" people and the "bad" people [...]

Philip Roth’s short novel Everyman, published in 2006 when the author was 73, is a bleak, blunt meditation on aging, the deterioration of the human body and the imminence of [...]

The Cave at Altamira, published in 1998 by Harry N. Abrams, is a celebration by scholars from several fields of the artistic wonders of a meandering cave near the small [...]