Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Kyiv, Ukraine, 1919. Everything is scarce in this city of half a million souls. Food. Water. Electricity. And chaos reigns. Control of the city and its suburbs shifts from week to week among warring factions. The Red Army. The Whites under Denikin. And armed peasants aroused by local warlords. Meanwhile, bands of cossacks rampage through the streets, wielding sabers on everyone they encounter. And it is one such saber that cuts down Samson Kolechko’s father and lops off Samson’s right ear. Now an orphan, Samson must navigate Kyiv’s dark and dangerous streets ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Kwei Quartey is a practicing physician with the mind and eye of an anthropologist. In two series of detective novels set in his native Ghana, he portrays crime investigations against the backdrop of Ghana’s rich ancient culture and its often dysfunctional society. Revealing entrenched superstitions and the predations of greedy shamans. Probing the inefficiencies and inequities of government institutions. Exposing the yawning gap between Ghana’s superrich entrepreneurs and government officials on the take—and the desperately poor people who crowd its cities an ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Just imagine: three enormous bombs explode almost simultaneously, destroying the three largest American-owned hotels on Singapore’s busiest thoroughfare. The heart of the city now lies in ruins. And Inspector Samuel Tay of the Singapore police lies in the rubble, having come to investigate, only to become tossed about by the explosion of a fourth bomb detonated to kill first responders. This is the unsettling opening of The Umbrella Man, Jake Needham’s intricately plotted second entry in the Samuel Tay series of Singapore detective novels. Who is Samuel Tay ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When Red Is Black paints a vivid picture of China in transition. Chief Inspector Chen Cao is an “emerging cadre” in the Chinese Communist Party, a published poet of some renown, and the head of the politically sensitive Special Investigations Squad of the Shanghai Police Bureau. Many regard him as an important man. But his boss, Party Secretary Li, calls the shots. And when Inspector Chen is on vacation and a new case arises that demands quick action, Li assigns Inspector Yu Guangming of Chen’s squad to take it on. Someone has murdered a “dissident writer” in ..read more

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Over the three-decade period from 1981 to 2009, American crime novelist Stuart Kaminsky wrote a series of sixteen police procedurals that reflected the shifting reality in Russian society. During that time, the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Republic, underwent cataclysmic change. The country’s economic system lurched from top-down state socialism to crony capitalism. Control of the government passed from anti-American hard-line Communists to pro-American democratic reformers to an insular, autocratic oligarchy openly hostile to the US. And at every step ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes He describes himself as “a whey-faced hunchback lawyer in black robe and cap, a pencase and dagger at my waist instead of a sword.” He is Matthew Shardlake, a sometime favorite of Henry Vill’s first minister, Thomas Cromwell, and this is his story. It’s C. J. Sansom’s second entry in his exceptionally well-researched series historical novels about the lawyer. It’s the year 1540 and Matthew, thirty-eight years old and conscious of old age approaching, is dreaming of retirement in the countryside. He’s now in court trying to save the life of a young woman accus ..read more

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Aki Ito arrives in Chicago with her family in January 1944 expecting to find her glamorous big sister, Rose, waiting for them. Finally, the family is reuniting after two years in the desert concentration camp of Manzanar. But Rose is missing. And all too soon, Aki learns that her beloved sister had died under the wheels of a subway train. The police insist it was suicide. But, certain she knows better, Aki dedicates herself single-mindedly to learning what happened, and why. And that’s the story Naomi Hirahara tells with such sensitivity and insight in her no ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, setting off a fast march to German reunification. But it was not a singular event, arising out of the blue. Because the reform movement launched by Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow four years earlier had triggered a series of increasingly assertive protest movements throughout Communist-run Eastern Europe. And for many months in 1989, East Germans, tens of thousands at a time, had taken to the streets. With fury and self-confidence rising, they denounced the ruling Socialist Unity Party and its enforcement arm, the Minist ..read more

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes During the last ten years of his life (1966-76), Mao Zedong shut down China’s schools and universities, denying an education to a generation. At his urging, millions of Chinese teenagers and young adults turned instead to revolution. They upended life throughout their country in a frenzy of fanatical posturing and violence. In this so-called Cultural Revolution, those who were already “educated youth” were sent to rural villages to learn the ways of the people by working for years in menial jobs among the peasantry. The central characters in Qiu Xiaolong’s no ..read more

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Inspector Samuel Tay has been with the Singapore police for nearly twenty years, much of that time as a homicide detective in the elite Special Investigations Section of CID. But he is squeamish and can’t stand the sight of mangled flesh and blood. So, when the body of a woman turns up displayed on a bed in a five-star hotel, he insists that his assistant view the remains in his stead. And a gruesome sight it is. Whoever killed the unidentified woman clearly hated her beyond the bounds of all reason. And now Sam and his assistant, Sergeant Robbie Kang, face t ..read more