Category: Europe

May 24, 2013

A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming *** (of 4)

An Mi-6 spook, Thomas Kell, on involuntary leave for perhaps roughing up an Afghan captive in Kabul is called back into service when the incoming...

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March 17, 2013

HHhH by Laurent Binet **** (of 4)

Reinhard Heydrich, The Blonde Beast, ruled Czechoslovakia for the Nazis until he was assassinated in 1942. One of Hitler’s favorites — how is it I...

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February 3, 2013

Code Name Verity *** (of 4) by Elizabeth Wein

This is the tale of a irrepressible friendship between two women doing very unusual jobs. It is World War II and England is barely holding its own...

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December 18, 2012

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom ** (of 4)

In the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell, working for a surly King Henry, is in battle with the Roman Catholic church. The Pope’s monasteries have dominated rural life for...

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November 30, 2012

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon ** (of 4)

Very rarely is an author’s style so obstructionist that it interferes, but sadly, Kanon’s frequent indecipherability kept me from finishing. Too bad. I was in...

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November 15, 2012

The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak *** (of 5)

Jozef Ondrej is taken by his father as an infant, after his mother dies, to the mountains of central Europe on the eve of the...

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October 11, 2012

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman *** (of 4)

Richard Mayhew, a boring British office worker, finds himself fighting for his life in London Below, a dark mysterious world beneath London’s subway system. Heroes...

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August 13, 2012

1493 by Charles Mann *** (of 4)

Prior to Columbus’s blundering into the Caribbean, there was negligible interchange of plants, animals, or humans between continents. Shortly thereafter the onset of large-scale globalization...

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August 6, 2012