Briar Patch Books

Tag: Historical fiction

  • Watch out for Miss (Deputy) Kopp

    Bob Moyer takes a slight diversion into history and an entertaining novel based on the true story of a woman crime fighter. Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer MISS KOPP’S MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS. By Amy Stewart. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 384 pages. $26. Don’t judge this book by its cover. Although the titillating title suggests some salacious material inside, there is…

  • Pirates, beware

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates. By James L. Haley. Books on Tape. Read by Paul Boehmer. 15 ½ hours; 13 CDs. Also available in hardcover from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 464 pages. Wow, what a book – a naval adventure tale full of action, interesting characters…

  • Portrait of the artist as a young resistance fighter

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson A COUNTRY ROAD, A TREE. By Jo Baker. Read by David Rintoul. Random House Audio. 10 ½ hours; 9 CDS. $40. Also available in print from Knopf. Ah, what a heady thing to be an aspiring young writer in Paris – until the Nazis come goose-stepping in. In her new novel,…

  • East side, west side, all around the town

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson BROOKLYN ON FIRE. By Lawrence H. Levy. Read by Cassandra Campbell. Books on Tape. 10 hours; 9 CDs. Mary Handley was the first woman to work as a detective with the Brooklyn Police Department. Her success there gained her quite a bit of fame, or maybe notoriety. She’s not giving…

  • The death of the republic

    A new semester of commuting to the journalism school at Chapel Hill provides new opportunities to listen to outstanding audio books. Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson DICTATOR. By Robert Harris. Read by David Rintoul. Random House Audio. 11 CDs; 14 hours. $45. Also available in print from Knopf, $26.95. Cicero comes down to us through…

  • History is what we make it

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson I approached this book with hope but also some trepidation, having loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society so much that I read it in print AND listened to it as an audio book. Annie Barrows co-wrote that wonderful book with her aunt, Mary Ann Shaffer. As its…

  • Spinning a good tale

    Before the textile mills came to my home state of North Carolina, they were major economic forces in New England. This fascinating historical novel by the author of The New York Times bestseller The Dressmaker is built around the true story of a murder at textile mill in Massachusetts that was one of the first…

  • A mothers’ pilgrimage

    This year is the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. I’ve long found the years during and after World War I particularly interesting. That’s been especially true for books set in England, where World War I profoundly changed so many things that British people had thought were constants in their world. I’ve…

  • So you thought you knew the Lindbergh story

    Redemption is sweet. For three years, I’ve had a novel by Melanie Benjamin on my office worktable and on my conscience. I loved her book Alice I Have Been, about the real Alice whom Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) wrote about in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  But I read it at an in-between time in…

  • The Third Reich and the power of fiction

    Bob Moyer doesn’t throw glowing adjectives around lightly. If he calls a book “amazing,” it’s worth taking note. By Robert Moyer HHhH: A Novel. By Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 327 pages. $26. The heated battle began shortly after World War II. As artists turned to the horrors of the…