Category: crime
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The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a Russian literary novel first published in 1880. The version I’ve read, newly translated in 2024, is from Michael R. Katz. I first heard of this novel after having read The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, in which the main character attempts to read the hefty novel.…
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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is a coming-of-age fiction novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. It’s a wonderful novel but one that requires patience, being that it is over 700 pages long. It explores the grief and sadness of a young boy as he is forced to grow up having lost his mother…
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Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon chronicles a journalist’s exclusive one-year police “internship” in 1988, within Baltimore’s homicide investigative department. This is truly a remarkable piece of journalism. It’s hard and gritty, something you’d obviously expect coming into the book, but the author makes reading all six hundred pages a breeze.…
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The Housemaid’s Secret by Frieda McFadden is the second book in The Housemaid trilogy. I remember really liking The Housemaid, so I was really hyped for this second installment. Being that the stories are not really interconnected, reading the previous books isn’t a requirement. This one has a nice psychological twist, but I don’t believe…
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The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is a dark psychological thriller novel about a woman found guilty of murdering her husband via multiple gunshot wounds within their home. Due to her refusal to talk afterwards, she’s been transferred to a psychiatric ward. Years later, after her notoriety and publicity have come down a bit, psychotherapist…
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The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina takes the readers on a bleak and almost dystopian view of life out in the deep ocean. With almost four years of hands-on experience traveling to countries to report on the myriad of topics and stories for the book, it’s a sobering and also horrifying experience to really learn…
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Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer talks about the brutal killing of an innocent woman and her baby daughter in the mid-1980s by two brothers whom one of them believed that doing so was doing God’s work. It’s the story about how Mormonism and equally important, how the different sects were created, especially…
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Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon is an appropriately named investigative novel that delves into the lives of the previous six or seven popes and how their winning the conclave election to become supreme rulers of the Roman Catholic Church have created an uproar,…
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Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard goes over the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s. I’ve always been fascinated by the witch trials, even going back to when I was a kid. Even though we were obviously taught that the accused were actually innocent, it still…
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The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World by Ben Macintyre tells the story of how six Arab gunmen stormed the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 while the U.S. embassy hostage crisis in Tehran was happening simultaneously. Not only did it change London forever afterwards because of…
The Mindless Catalog 