The Spy from Beijing: An Espionage Thriller
by Joan M Kop, 2025 Local Spokane writer Joan M Kop’s latest book is the spy thriller The Spy from Beijing: An Espionage Thriller. She takes us on a unique journey that weaves in the intelligence threat to the US from China, embedded spies and double agents, potential theft of DNA databases to gain economic […]
Seren
by Peter Gooch, 2025 Seren is a mystery set in the art world of 1970s Detroit. Many mysteries, murder and otherwise, as it turns out. [This page contains affiliate links, meaning that if you make a purchase from a link on this page, I will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.] […]
Presumed Guilty
by Scott Turow, 2025 Scott Turow released this book as a follow-up to his 1987 blockbuster, Presumed Innocent, where we met his former prosecutor and former judge, Rusty Sabich, for the first time. In an interview for The New York Times, I learned that the initial idea for Presumed Guilty was the splashy, headline-grabbing disappearance, […]
2024 Christmas Book Review Roundup
If you have a hard-to-buy-for book lover on your Christmas list, here is a vetted list of 34 books I’ve read this year that I can highly recommend! Those of you who follow this blog know that I write periodic book reviews during the year. Where does the time go? I couldn’t possibly write reviews […]
The Siege
by Ben Macintyre, 2024 Most Americans remember the Iranian hostage crisis well, which occurred during President Jimmy Carter’s term. For those of you who were too young in the late 1970s, or who aren’t American on my subscriber list, 52 American citizens and diplomats were taken hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran by armed […]
The Silence of the Dead
by Frank Zafiro and Colin Conway, 2024 The Silence of the Dead came across my Facebook feed about 6 weeks ago, as I recently became a member of my local writer’s guild. I saw that a Spokane-based writer had a new book release—a crime novel centering on possible corruption in the Spokane Police Department (SPD), spanning […]
The Other Einstein
by Marie Benedict, 2016 If you enjoyed the book Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, and if that book made you mad about the way women in science were treated in the 1950s and 60s, then take a step back about 50 years and prepare to get even madder. The Other Einstein, released in 2016, […]
My Friends
by Hisham Matar, 2024 My Friends is Hisham Matar’s third novel and was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It covers the tumultuous decades just before and after the Arab Spring in Islamic countries and in the surrounding countries where those fleeing persecution took refuge. The main character, a young Libyan student named Khaled, is […]
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
by Kevin Fedarko, 2024 Just a few weeks ago I came across a book review in The New York Times of A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon, a book about two ill-prepared hikers determined to go the length of the Grand Canyon on foot (almost […]
Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story
by Kristine S. Ervin, 2024 Rabbit Heart is part memoir, part cold-case investigation of a brutal abduction and murder of an innocent young mother from a shopping mall parking lot in Oklahoma City in 1986. Kathy Sue Engle had an 8-year-old daughter Kristine and a 13-year-old son Rolland, a devoted husband, no known enemies, and […]
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
by Nathan Thrall, 2023 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, 2024! A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a true story that occurred in 2012, a tragedy involving a bus full of Palestinian school children occurring just outside Jerusalem. The bus collided with an 18-wheeler semitruck on a highway during a […]
Birnam Wood
by Eleanor Catton, 2023 Birnam Wood was on so many “best of” lists for 2023 that I finally broke down and ordered it. Eleanor Catton already has quite a legacy: at 28, she was the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize in 2013 for The Luminaries. Yes, I read that one too, 10 years ago. […]
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People
by Tracy Kidder, 2023 Tracy Kidder, a literary journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine in 1981, has written a compassionate and personal account of the homeless community in Boston, Massachusetts, and the medical doctor who is determined to treat them wherever they are—under a pile of dirty blankets, […]
Say Nothing—A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
by Patrick Radden Keefe, 2019 Spurred on by reading the 2013 obituary of Dolours Price in the New York Times, the author, a journalist for The New Yorker, became intrigued enough by her story to start researching for Say Nothing. Ms. Price, formerly a central figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), had been the […]
Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver, 2022 Demon Copperhead tells the raw, emotional tale of a 10-year-old boy’s heartbreaking childhood and adolescence scarred by drug addiction, sudden death, child abuse, and being bounced around through the foster system in a small Virginia town. Damon Fields is the boy’s real name; “Demon Copperhead” becomes his nickname, and it sticks. […]