It’s not often I feel this enthusiastic about a debut novel from a newly-published writer. In A Wolf in Hinelheim Jenny Mayhew has created a very believable community of characters and placed them in a fictional region of Germany in 1926.  Her writing and complex plotting shows a maturity which might suggest that she has [...]

A bit of relaxation reading this week, but this time, a very gripping novel set in Stalin’s Russia involving a personal audience with Stalin, a hunt for a great art treasure and a terrifying journey across the Russian/German front-line.

I’ve only recently come across Sam Eastland although he has been writing for a very long [...]

Late last year I was entranced by Lynn Shepherd’s literary novel Tom All Alone’s in which private detective Charles Maddox took on a case involving among others, characters from Dickens’ Bleak House. I was delighted to discover that her new book A Treacherous Likeness is published this month and I made sure that I [...]

You know quality when you see it and with Alan Furst’s books set in Europe in and around World War 2 you know that quality is guaranteed.   His new book, Mission to Paris is no exception.  Frederick Stahl, an Austrian-born film actor based in the USA is sent to Paris in 1938 by Warner [...]

After reading C J Samson’s Dominion it was interesting to read another book set in the same period.  Simon Tolkien’s new book, Orders from Berlin, takes place in a London suffering from the Blitz, with Hitler’s forces massing on the French coast and preparations being made in London for what seems to be the [...]