Reviews

Author interviews and brief reviews of mystery novels, history books, and global policy works.

George Packer discusses The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Strange Days: PW Talks With George Packer. Excerpts from a conversation about a country that is changing, not for the better.

How to Find Your Way in the Dark manages to be both a tough coming-of-age picaresque and a riotous crime novel that channels the spirit of Lenny Bruce. Miller’s latest earns a PW starred review.

Former South Korean national security ambassador Chung Min Lee on The Hermit King: The Dangerous Game of Kim Jong Un. Not Your Normal Dictatorship: PW Talks with Chung Min Lee offers keen insights about the world’s strangest and scariest totalitarian state.

Journalist Joanna Chiu assesses China’s escalating global belligerence and explains how we got here, taking the West to task for a greedy, markets-focused complacency.

Scandinavian noir in a harsh and beautiful setting. The second book in Ould’s Faroe Islands trilogy shows how art and life sometimes have grim parallels.

White, working-class Americans are dying “deaths of despair” at ever-higher rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease. A hard look at an American crisis.

Inspector Montalbano puzzles over odd crimes, plumbs the past and ponders the future in a droll, meditative Sicilian mystery, one of the final books from Camilleri, Italy’s late dean of crime fiction.

The collected speeches and articles in this slim volume show Douglass as a tireless advocate for racial equality in a hostile climate.

The death throes of the Third Reich are rendered in vivid, desperate detail, with delusional Nazi schemes and harrowing tales of suffering and Russian vengeance.

Before D-Day was an Allied triumph, it was harrowingly close to a terrible defeat. Kershaw’s gripping account earns a PW starred review.

Alaskan crime doyenne Stabenow revives a beloved character as Alaska State Trooper Liam Campbell starts fresh in a town haunted by old crimes and an uncertain future, earning a PW starred review.

This deranged dystopian fantasy proves they can’t all be winners. My editor removed the phrase “book-like object” from the final draft.