The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius

January 25, 2018June 5, 2022Leave a comment

The Quantum Spy is the most recent offering from David Ignatius.

Ignatius is a novelist and a journalist from the USA. He studied at Harvard University and King’s College, Cambridge in the UK. He has been given many awards including, the Urbino World Press Award from the Italians, a lifetime achievement award from the International Committee for Foreign Journalism and the Legion of Honour from the French.

David Ignatius is a best-selling author of such works as Body of Lies, The Bank of Fear and The Director. The Quantum Spy is a story of worldwide espionage, betrayal and high-tech.

In a world where technology races ahead exponentially, the threat of a super-fast quantum computer is ever more real.

CIA officer Harris Chang tracks a Chinese informant who may put the American’s top-secret research laboratories at risk.

The development of the quantum computer would put China or America in overall control for decades to come.

Ignatius has written a spellbinding thriller with action racing across the world, from North America and on to Mexico and Singapore.

This is a classy cyber thriller which may well foretell the future for us all. Well worth the read!

Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith

January 23, 2018June 5, 2022Leave a comment

After readying Gorky Park, I couldn’t wait to read the next in the Arkady Renko series, Polar Star.

Arkady Renko had made many enemies. He had been the top investigator in Moscow, but now, his party membership removed, he was forced to work in Siberia, where so many others had perished.

He was detailed to toil on a Soviet factory ship which fished the deathly cold waters between Siberia and Alaska, the Bering Sea.

No longer the great criminal man, but now a second-class seaman with a dark past.

Following an enigmatic death of a crew member, the captain gives Renko the chance of a kind of redemption. The woman’s dead body had been hauled in among the fish taken up by the net. The matter is puzzling but has the feel of murder rather than misadventure.

Renko faces desperate odds and an almost unsolvable crime with implications which go beyond the borders of Mother Russia.

Polar Star is another superb novel by author Martin Cruz Smith.

‘Impossible to put down . . . a book of heart-stopping suspense and intricate plotting, but also a meticulously researched, ambitious literary work of great distinction.’ The Detroit News

‘Polar Star is not merely the work of our best writer of suspense, but one of our best writers, period’ New York Times

‘Splendid … . the reader will be kept guessing to the end’ Evening Standard

‘Stunning.’ The New York Times Book Review

‘Martin Cruz Smith writes the most inventive thrillers of anyone in the first rank of thriller writers.’ The Washington Post Book World

‘Gripping . . . absorbing.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Cruz Smith’s ability is to tell both a thriller and a novel at once, without losing either strand. There are whispers of Conrad and Graham Greene in this novel’ Sydney Morning Herald

The Silk Stocking Murders by Anthony Berkeley

January 22, 2018June 5, 2022Leave a comment

The Silk Stocking Murders by Anthony Berkeley, was first published in 1928 and is one of Berkeley’s earliest novels.

Born, Anthony Berkeley Cox in Watford in 1893 he attended Sherborne School and University College in Oxford. Like many of his contemporaries he served in the Army during World War I. He honed his writing skills working as a journalist for magazines such as Punch and The Humorist among others. In 1930 the Detection Club was founded in London by various popular mystery writers such as Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts and the great Agatha Christie.

From the 1940s onwards, he wrote for several of the major newspapers including The Guardian, The Sunday Times and the Manchester Guardian.

Anthony Berkeley Cox wrote under various pseudonyms, including Anthony Berkeley, Francis Iles and A. Monmouth Platts.

His novel, the Layton Court Mystery which was published in 1925 was his first novel. The amateur detective, Roger Sheringham, features here first and appeared in many later novels.

His novel ‘Before the Fact’ hit the silver screen as the 1941 classic film Suspicion. It starred Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine and was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The Silk Stocking Murders novel is a masterpiece and unusual for it’s time to involve a serial killer.

Roger Sheringham, though a heavy drinker, was a superb, though flawed, detective. Frequently putting his trust, wrongly, in individuals and making repeated mistakes he had a knack of meandering his way to the truth.

The Silk Stocking Murders sees him trying to solve the disappearance of a vicar’s daughter in London. Sheringham is horrified to find that the young woman is dead. The girl was found hanging, her own silk stocking around her neck. Though her death has the appearance of a suicide, Sheringham knows of other deaths throughout London and he sees a pattern developing. He is convinced that it is the work of a crazed madman.

For it’s time this must have been a quite shocking and horrific tale of a psychotic killer lose on the streets of London. The use of lingerie, Ground-breaking and still enthralling after all of these years, the story of a rather unusually flawed sleuth is well worth the read. The Silk Stocking Murders is published by HarperCollins and is available on Amazon or at good bookstores.

If conspiracies, crime or political thrillers are your thing then keep reading my blog for new and exciting authors.