Erik Larson is one of our best non-fiction writers.

The Devil in the White City is the best of his books I’ve read, so far.

This one is excellent too. An inside early look at Berlin under the physically unimpressive Adolf Hitler and his lickspittles.

WW II would result in 70–85 million dead, or about 3% of the 1940 world population. Hitler personally responsible for many of those millions.

He committed suicide April 30, 1945. Could Hitler have been stopped earlier?

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin is the true story of American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, particularly the years 1933 to 1937 when he and his family, including his daughter Martha, lived in Berlin. …

Martha, separated from her husband and in the process of divorce, became caught up in the glamor and excitement of Berlin’s social scene and had a series of liaisons, most of them sexual, including among them Gestapo head Rudolf Diels and Soviet attaché and secret agent Boris Vinogradov. 

In fact, daughter Martha was once presented to Hitler. One of the Führer’s henchmen hoped the dictator would be attracted. An American concubine would make his hateful regime more palatable to the USA.

Whodunnit?

Agatha Christie would like this book.

Shari Lapena is one of the best murder mystery writers working today.

Fred and Sheila Merton are brutally murdered the night after an Easter dinner with their three adult kids. Who, of course, are devastated.

Or are they?

They each stand to inherit millions. …

Readers try to eliminate suspects one at a time.

Excellent. Art. Philosophy. Violence.

And fly fishing.

“Peter Heller is the poet laureate of the literary thriller.” —Michael Koryta

Painter is my second Heller book, I liked this one better than The Guide.

I’ll read more from this author. Original and surprising. Opposite of the formulaic and predictable books of Baldacci, for example.

Jim Stegner is a troubled, brilliant artist.

He flees the art scene of Santa Fe to start fresh in the valleys of rural Colorado.

Here he spends his days painting and fly fishing, trying to find a way to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him.

But one afternoon, on a dirt road, Jim comes across a man beating a small horse, and a brutal encounter rips his quiet life wide open. …

PeterHeller.net

I recommend this book published 2011.

Though Peter May is award winning and very prolific, this is the first of his many books that I’ve read.

The Blackhouse is a suspense thriller, first novel of The Lewis Trilogy, written by the Scottish writer Peter May.

The action takes place mostly on the remote and weather-beaten Isle of Lewis off the coast of northern Scotland.

Detective Inspector Finlay Macleod (known as Fin), a native of the island, is sent from his Edinburgh police station to investigate the murder …

One unique thread is the annual guga hunt. Men from Fin’s village of Ness sail end of summer to the tiny rock island of Sula Sgeir. They harvest a maximum of 2,000 gannet chicks (known as gouge) from their nests. That’s been a tradition since well before 1549.