Wash Your Damn Hands!: A Tale of Deception and Birth

I am a great fan of Ignaz Semmelweis. I met him when researching my book on Hitler and his time in Vienna. I found the story compelling. Here was a physician who saw the obvious–not the easiest thing to do. Faced with mortality rates of 10 to 35% for women giving birth in the clinics [...]

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Waiting for the Punters: The Mean Streets of South London in the Novels of Linda Regan

British actor-turned novelist Linda Regan brings the mean streets of South London alive in two different procedural series. First in the series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Paul Banham and his assistant, DI Alison Grainger, Behind You, provides a “brutal murder mystery with touches of British cozy,” according to Booklist, whose reviewer went on to praise [...]

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Eighteenth-Century Leeds: The “Heartbeat” of the Richard Nottingham Series by Chris Nickson

British music journalist Chris Nickson is the author of the Richard Nottingham books, historical mysteries set in Leeds in the 1730s and featuring Nottingham, the Constable of the city, and his deputy, John Sedgwick. As Nickson has said of his series: “The books are about more than murder. They’re about the people of Leeds and [...]

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The “Place of Place” in the Viennese Mysteries of J. Sydney Jones

The Silence, the third novel in my Viennese Mysteries series, continues to earn kudos from reviewers. Library Journal, in a starred review, just called it an “intricately plotted, gracefully written, and totally immersive read,” while Kirkus Reviews, in its Februrary 1, 2012, edition, noted: “Jones’ measured, stately prose is perfectly in tune with his period setting [...]

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