by Philip Rafferty | Mar 22, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Current Events & Politics
The election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States was a surprise to the nation. From the outset, reality star and bankruptcy mogul, Trump seemed like a long shot until he wasn’t. In the days, weeks, and months following his inauguration, many...
by Philip Rafferty | Feb 22, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), General Fiction, Mystery, Crime & Thriller
Javier Marias is the author of more than a dozen novels and his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy has been lauded by some as the greatest European work of the 21st century. Marias’ work is always a high literary endeavor, Marias himself an anglophile who got into the...
by Philip Rafferty | Feb 16, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Mystery, Crime & Thriller
Teddy Rinaldi, an ambassador to a Persian Gulf king, gets a call from his wife Christina explaining that their 8-year-old son Toby has been kidnapped while flying from NY to San Francisco. With no sign of their son anywhere, and nowhere else to turn, Ambassador...
by Philip Rafferty | Jan 18, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Current Events & Politics, General Fiction, Historical Fiction
Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City is a beautiful and gut wrenching multi-generational novel centered on the time of the rise of the Ba’athist party regime in Aleppo. The destruction that the party inflicts on Syria is seen through the lives...
by Philip Rafferty | Jan 4, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Historical Fiction, Mystery, Crime & Thriller
Paulo Coelho gives us a fictionalized account of Mata Hari, the accused spy and famous dutch exotic dancer, in his new aptly titled book The Spy. Hari has been the subject of film, biography, documentary, and mythic lore. Coelho takes a turn at her and the results is...