Greg Iles died a couple of months ago at the age of 65. He was born in Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, West Germany, but lived his life in Natchez, Mississippi. He was one of the great American novelists to have obtained his college education at Ole Miss. And like many other best-selling authors (some in the Southern Tradition, some not) like humorist Dave Barry, Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Scott Turow, Roy Blunt, and Matt Groening, he was

I suppose that, for at least some men, marrying the daughter of a billionaire would be a dream come true. But what if that billionaire is a Russian oligarch who has agents and influence that reach everywhere? And what if, for some reason, that “lucky” man had done something that displeased his father-in-law? Well, for Paul Brightman, a very successful hedge-fund manager, that dream became a nightmare. Joseph Finder (“The Oligarch’s Daughter,” 2025, 438 pages in hardback forma

Michael Connelly’s protagonist, Mickey Haller (formerly known as the Lincoln Lawyer) was King of the Courtroom when he handled criminal cases. However, he’s sold off the Lincolns and is now located in a warehouse with an internal chamber that is safeguarded against electronic surveillance. Connelly writes, “The cage was a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cube of chain link. Across the top was a crosshatch of wires supporting copper mesh that also draped down all four sides of the c

First, you may think that Lisa Scottoline has written a YA book. She has not. This book is written from several POVs, and the first fourteen chapters (99 pages) are from 15-year-old teens (Allie, Sasha, David, Julian, and Kyle). Because it’s written in their voice, it’s an easy mistake. The rest of the book is a mix of the teens and their parents (Linda Garvey, Allie’s mother; Daphne Barrow, Sasha’s mother; Bill Hybrinski, David’s father; Scot Browne, Julian’s father and the

Harlan Coben is a best-selling author whose previous novel, The Stranger, has been the basis for a Netflix series.According to the cover of The Woods (2007, 404 pages in both hardback and softback), this work, too, is coming to Netflix.Coben’s novels have been translated into 45 languages and he’s sold more than 75 million copies of his mystery/thrillers worldwide.He’s on the short list of my favorite contemporary authors. In The Woods, Paul Copeland, prosecutor for the Distr

I’m not sure if Sandra Brown knows how to write a novel without at least one steamy sex scene. She is the counterpoint to John Grisham who probably couldn’t write a sex scene if his life depended upon it. But the thing that gets me about Sandra Brown is that she writes great novels, wonderful plots, believable characters. I’ve read many of her books, and find the blow-by-blow scenes of carnal intimacy to be irrelevant. After I finished a few of her novels, I learned to spot t

Having read and been horrified by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, I was disappointed by The Heart Goes Last (2015, 380 pages in softcover format). Perhaps my review is biased by my own experience when I was a child. My family was poor, living paycheck to almost paycheck. By that I mean that the money often ran out before the next paycheck came in. So, we’d charge our food at the local grocery store for a day or two until Dad got hom

I’ve been asked why I generally review crime/mystery/ suspense/thriller-type novels. I suppose that my most direct answer is that I enjoy the genre. But these books are also a break from the books that I needed to read during my professional life. Most of those were in the fields of sociology and psychology, although I also taught a class titled “Sociology through Literature,” which was based on “modern classics.” This generation of YA (Young Adult) books also fascinates me b