The first time I tried to write a serious story, everyone thought it was hilarious. Right then I decided that I should lean into my strength and stick with comedy. I’ve written comedy screenplays for Hollywood and video games chockful full of comedy. I was even nominated for a Writer’s Guild Award for one of them. (Red Alert 3 starring Tim Curry, Jonathon Pryce, George Takei, Peter Stormare, and J.K. Simmonds.) So when I decided to write novels, I decided to write what I love to read. Comedy Thrillers. Good ones are hard to find. And laughter is good for us all.
Again, it’s difficult to pick a favorite Vonnegut book. I think he may have influenced my writing more than any other author. More than Ian Fleming. More than Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler. Some might say he isn’t really a thriller writer. Some may classify him as a writer of sci-fi. And yeah, maybe. But he’s so much more than that. He’s a zany magician and mad scientist who can turn utter tragedy into very black comedy. Mother Night is about Nazis and spies and war crimes and white supremacists. All the elements of a thriller combined with Vonnegut’s patented absurdity. I find every one of Kurt Vonnegut’s books thrilling, thoughtful, and hilarious.
“Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.”—Time
Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.
I made up Faythe of North Hinkapee by being a jerk! I was ranting about
how bad a "best seller" book I had read was. My wife looked at me and
said, "So, could you write a bestseller?" I was challenged, and then,
somehow, this book just tumbled out. It was about a girl in Colonial
Times—her family burned as witches—vowing vengeance and how she gets
it. My wife looked at me and said: “My God, that could be a bestseller!’ My kids also loved the story. For about twenty years, I
planned to write it, and after a ton of work, I finally finished.
Any time Kate Quinn writes a book, I grab it immediately. Her characters are always amazing women doing amazing things. This one is, I think, her best.
The character of Nina is possibly the most interesting single character I have ever read about. I can’t describe Nina as words just fail me. I will never forget her. Nor will I forget the evil huntress either.
This is World War II historical fiction at its absolute best, as Ms. Quinn does super solid research.
From the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling novel, THE ALICE NETWORK, comes another fascinating historical novel about a battle-haunted English journalist and a Russian female bomber pilot who join forces to track the Huntress, a Nazi war criminal gone to ground in America.
In the aftermath of war, the hunter becomes the hunted...
Bold and fearless, Nina Markova always dreamed of flying. When the Nazis attack the Soviet Union, she risks everything to join the legendary Night Witches, an all-female night bomber regiment wreaking havoc on the invading Germans. When she is stranded behind enemy…
I'm Lyra R. Saenz. I'm an off-the-clock goth, a steampunk romantic, and a loyal adopter of lonely books. I'm a writer of genre-breakers and witchy makeovers. I've spent my life with either my nose in a book or my heart on the stage, and my passion for art is my drive every day. I grew up watching Star Wars, which is probably the apex of all magic merged with science settings, and I've always wondered why people don't make more of that: a super advanced society where witches and wizards are respected parts of the world.
First of all, the main character, Laytham, gets my little bi-sexual heart leaping with excitement. He’s sexy and dark and mysterious. He’s got some serious issues but handles it all with a healthy dose of cynicism and magic.
I love how gritty this book is. It’s the stench of the city mixed with the sweat and arousal of a dance club. I’ve never seen magic done this way, where one of the characters uses the computer to access his own magical network.
I read this book at a time in my life when things just were not going in the direction I wanted them to. It inspired me to take back control of my life. In a lot of ways, it is very cyberpunk, rooted in urban fantasy.
In the more shadowy corners of the world, frequented by angels and demons and everything in- between, Laytham Ballard is a legend. It's said he raised the dead at the age of ten, stole the Philosopher's Stone in Vegas back in 1999, and survived the bloodsucking kiss of the Mosquito Queen. Wise in the hidden ways of the night, he's also a cynical bastard who stopped thinking of himself as the good guy a long time ago. Now a promise to a dying friend has Ballard on the trail of an escaped Serbian war criminal with friends in both high…
Born in a displaced persons camp in Germany after World War 2, Ettie immigrated with her parents to the USA. She grew up and was educated in New York City and Pennsylvania and immigrated to Israel after completing graduate school. After retiring from a career in international schools in 6 countries, she currently resides in Arizona with her husband. She is a Board member for the Phoenix Holocaust Association and devotes much time to giving presentations to youth and adults worldwide.
While the author and I came from different sides of the same fence, I found myself empathizing with her deathbed promise, her fears, her worries, her self-doubt, and her commitment to finding, and eventually exposing, the truth. Setting out to write what should have been a fairly ‘easy’ biographical tribute to her late grandfather – hailed as a Lithuanian hero- she discovered - and uncovered - details and documents which shattered her world and confirmed “the gossip.” She began to doubt the stories she was told as a child and the people who told them- both in her Lithuanian-American neighborhood and back in the old country. What a page-turner…what agony and pain…until she finally made her courageous decision. Bravo, Silvia.
I am passionate about the book because both my parents were survivors of the Lithuanian version of the Holocaust. There were very few survivors from Lithuania, and Foti’s book helps…
Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community.
But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a…
I am a historian of international conflict who focuses on understanding the enemy. For most of my career, I have studied why we so often misread others, and how those misperceptions lead to war. The current crisis in Ukraine is just one more example of how the parties involved misunderstood each other. I believe that if we could improve this one ability, we would substantially lessen the likelihood, frequency, and severity of war.
Set in the years immediately following Japan’s surrender in WWII, this less well-known novel offers insight into how some Japanese soldiers saw their behavior: not as war criminals, but as acting in retaliation for American bombing raids. The story should not be read as an exoneration of Japanese atrocities, but rather as a window into the much larger problem of understanding an enemy’s perspective. Warning: this perspective shift is sure to make you uncomfortable, forcing you to revisit some assumptions about the “Good War.”
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed. Japan is in ruins and occupied by the Americans.
Takuya, an ex-officer in the Imperial Army, has returned to his native village only to learn that the Occupation authorities are intensifying their efforts to apprehend suspected war criminals. And those who are found guilty are being sentenced to death.
Fearing that his role in the execution of a number of American pilots, Takuya takes to the road and becomes a fugitive in his own country.
One Man's Justice is both a reflection on the murky reality of war and a page-turning novel of pursuit…
As someone who’s had a lifelong interest in psychology, especially abnormal psychology, I’ve always been fascinated the small destructions some people inflict on others – sometimes even on themselves. For me the greatest crime is not to kill someone but to reduce them by making their life uncomfortable or unwelcome. The ability to do this is what I would call a “negative skill.” It’s not easy, but some people do it uncannily well, and without caring. Perhaps because this is so alien to me, I remain riveted by stories that portray it, and some cases attempt to explain it. These are a few of those stories.
Pressburger is better known as half of the film duo Powell and Pressburger, but The Glass Pearls shows he missed a career when he went into film.
Karl Braun, the protagonist of this book, is an escaped Nazi living in London some years after the end of World War II. He attempts to have a life, but lives in constant fear of being found and rounded up (yes, the book is aware of this irony).
The “quiet cruelty” comes from the fact that, like it or not, Pressburger’s wonderful ability at portraying Braun’s interior and his fear make the reader invest in him.
You end the novel troubled to discover that you have sympathized with – even wished for the escape of – a Nazi.
For fans of The Passenger, this thrilling tale of an ex-Nazi surgeon hiding in plain sight in 1960s London by the celebrated filmmaker is a lost noir gem, introduced by Anthony Quinn and narrated on audio by Mark Gatiss.
'Stunning: incredibly good, tense and compelling and morally complex.' Ian Rankin 'This extraordinary novel had me hooked from start to finish.' Sarah Waters 'An outstanding novel: gripping, tense and darkly unsettling. ' Jonathan Freedland 'A wonderfully compelling noir thriller and audacious and challenging act of imagination.' William Boyd
Nothing is more inviting to disclose your secrets than to be told by…
I like to create silly, fun things. This is not the kind of content I consume. If something makes me feel bad, I generally like it; if it is also beautiful, I will like it a lot. It is through the generosity of the Shepherd team that I was allowed to flip a promo for a gay dad comic into a way for me to peer pressure you into consuming media that will make you feel bad. Consider this list an aperitif for the feel-goodness of Dream Daddy, a delicate shot glass of cyanide after a hearty meal. Bon appetit!
Like everyone else with a pulse, I love Stephen King. So here’s a slightly underrated pull so I don’t lose my horror fan street cred. Apt Pupil is the first King book I’ve read that made me feel legitimately dirty. The creeping menace, the way he subverts your expectations, this excruciating dance of mutually assured destruction between Todd and Denker... just fabulous. Nothing supernatural, no murderous trucks or universe-vomiting turtles, just humans being mundane and evil. And you won’t have to spend the whole book wondering if King is gonna biff the ending, as he is often wont to do—he sticks the landing and it’s absolutely killer. Love it. Read it.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King’s timeless coming-of-age novella, Apt Pupil—published in his 1982 story collection Different Seasons and made into a 1998 Tristar movie starring Ian McKellan and Brad Renfro—now available for the first time as a standalone publication.
If you don’t believe in the existence of evil, you have a lot to learn.
Todd Bowden is an apt pupil. Good grades, good family, a paper route. But he is about to meet a different kind of teacher, Mr. Dussander, and to learn all about Dussander’s dark and deadly past…a decades-old manhunt Dussander has escaped to this…
I once had a history advisor in school whom I informed that I was studying history so I could write fiction better. I saw him cringe a bit at that. Even so, I think that history and fiction–and the mystery–go together well. I am always drawn by mystery dramas–and by the drama of real lives facing and unraveling their way through real events. Of course, that led to graduate studies in cultural and intellectual history, to many years of teaching literature, and to passionate reading of mystery novels. Sparkling fiction and strong narrative history, for me, continue to stimulate a sense of wonder at human experience and this incredible universe we live in.
A secret intelligence program with Nazi scientists is described in such colorful detail that this nonfiction book riveted my attention.
What was most compelling for me was the story of how these scientists and technological experts were utilized by American ingenuity. A fascinating and well-researched history book always holds my interest.
In the chaos following WWII, many of Germany's remaining resources were divvied up among allied forces. Some of the greatest spoils were the Third Reich's scientific minds--the minds that made their programs in aerospace and rocketry the best in the world. The United States secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' forbidden knowledge outweighed their crimes, and the government formed a covert organization called Operation Paperclip to allow them to work without the knowledge of the American public.
Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, with access to German archival documents (including, notably, papers available…
I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna (Austria), interested in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. I am fascinated by the work of classical philosophers—foremost, Immanuel Kant and David Hume. A particularly interesting question for me concerns how political and legal systems shape people's identity and self-understanding. One focus of my research is on the distorted legal framework of National Socialist Germany. I wrote, together with Professor J. David Velleman (New York University), Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge. In German: "Weil ich nun mal ein Gerechtigkeitsfanatiker bin." Der Fall des SS-Richters Konrad Morgen.
How could so many Nazi perpetrators escape to South America? Most relied on the help of a bishop of the Catholic Church in the Vatican, Alois Hudal.
Sands describes the structure of this support system (the so-called ratline) through the story of former SS-Obergruppenführer Otto Gustav Wächter, the governor of Galicia (1942–1944), who was responsible for the deportation of nearly 500,000 Jews to the Nazi death camps.
Wächter's post-war escape to Argentina actually ended in Rome, where he died of an infection in July 1949. Sands offers a riveting analysis of how this man found his way into the Nazi party, rose to a position that implicated him in mass murder, and how, with the support of his wife, he managed to hide in the Austrian mountains for years after the war. Sands also reflects on how difficult it is for the next generation to face up to the…
A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and the Nazi escape route to Perón's Argentina,"the Ratline"—from the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning East West Street.
"Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." —John le Carré, internationally renowned bestselling author
Baron Otto von Wächter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon…
Raised in a proud Jewish home, I was instilled with an appreciation for my cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, I am utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, I became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE,The Hollywood Reporter,Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment. I currently reside in Philadelphia with my wife, Leora, and adorable Cavapoo, Archie.
The bestsellers penned by Forsyth, Levin, and Goldman would not exist without the true stories of the men and women who worked tirelessly in the years after World War II to bring escaped Nazis to justice.
Nagorski’s wonderfully researched work of non-fiction shines a much-deserved light on those individuals who sought closure on behalf of the murdered 6 million when no one else cared to do so: Fritz Bauer, Simon Wiesenthal, Tuvia Friedman, Elizabeth Holtzman, Beate, and Serge Klarsfeld, and more.
More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, the era of the Nazi Hunters is drawing to a close as they and the hunted die off. Their saga can now be told almost in its entirety. After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent. In Pursuit…
