It was their first night on the small Soldier Island, and the group of eight guests had just dined on an excellent supper, served by Rogers the butler and prepared [...]

Seven Smith’s girlfriend Joy asks him about Jim Flood.  “You speak of him with affection, yet he’s done such terrible things.” What kind of guy is he? Seven, a 21-year-old [...]

For one reason or another, I’ve owned a copy of the Richard Hughes novel A High Wind in Jamaica, for about 40 years, but it wasn’t until the past week [...]

As P.D. James’s 1975 mystery The Black Tower opens, Police Commander Adam Dalgliesh has just learned that the doctors made a mistake.  He’s not going to die of acute leukemia.  [...]

Havelock Vetinari, not yet Patrician — in fact, still a student in the Assassin’s Guild — is a lot better at the work of “inhuming” targets than his teachers realize.  [...]

Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes, completed during the first decade of the 14th century, are one of the treasures of Western civilization. And Giuseppe Basile’s Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, published [...]

And when he finally gets to heaven, after spending 30 years meandering the Universe and then racing a comet, Captain Elias Stormfield of San Francisco (size 13 halo) finds out [...]

Space Prison by Tom Godwin is a crackerjack novel that richly fulfills the modest boast on its cover: “A Science-Fiction Adventure.” In fact, I wonder if the book would have [...]

In the 1850s, Swedish writer Fredricka Bremer visited to Chicago and, to say the least, was not impressed. Ben Wilson notes in his sweeping and astute Metropolis: A History of [...]

Philip K. Dick performs a clever feat of literary dipsy-doodle at the end of his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and he throws into question the reality [...]