Munich

Robert Harris's novel about the 1938 conference between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain makes compelling reading as fiction but also seems to have the underlying aim of rescuing the British prime minister's reputation from obloquy. While Chamberlain certainly does not emerge from the novel as any kind of hero, he does earn the reader's admiration for his dogged efforts to forestall war. As it happens, Hitler in 1945 said that he should have gone to war in 1938, when Britain's military was in a woeful state. Instead, under Chamberlain's direction, the nation launched a rearmament drive that resulted in a stiffer defense when war did come a year later. Those who continue to call Chamberlain an appeaser must be prepared to answer his question: Should Britain and France have gone to war in 1938 to defend parts of Czechoslovakia where a majority of the population was German and wanted to rejoin Germany?

Walking with Ghosts

Gabriel Byrne's memoir, while enjoyable, suffers from an over-emphasis on his childhood and a shortage of material on his acting career. Everyone thinks his or her childhood is exceptional, but most are not and do not merit pages and pages of dreamy reminiscences. 

The Second Sleep

Robert Harris has done speculative fiction before – Fatherland posited a world in which Germany had won World War II – but this time he imagines a new Middle Ages set 800 or so years in the future, after a 2020s Apocalypse caused by natural or man-made disasters or both. Unless you read the spoiler blurbs on the rear cover, it will take about 50 pages to get to the gist of the novel. Even then, Harris has many more secrets to reveal as he unpeels the onion. The theme isn't as speculative as all that, in reality. There is plenty of history to show that human progress can be halted or reversed: Witness the tearing down of Roman structures for building materials when civilization was overturned, or the death cult that causes millions of people to reject life-saving medicines.

V2

In my experience Robert Harris has never failed to deliver the goods, and V2 is no exception. It is a novelized account of the Nazi V2 rocket attacks against London during the closing months of World War II. Fictional characters rub shoulders with Wernher von Braun on the German side, while on the British side an officer of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps experiences a V2 attack firsthand and later travels to Belgium as part of a team to try to locate launch sites in occupied Holland. Harris's formula is deceptively simple, yet seemingly no one else can carry it off with his élan: deep research, presented lightly, wrapped around a compelling narrative.

Animal

Several times while reading Lisa Taddeo's novel I thought to myself, "I'm not buying it." But while there was an artificiality to some of the scenes, I was able to take my judgment hat off and let the writer do her thing. It's a strange novel, but one that offers insights into the lives and thinking of women.

Maigret Gets Angry

In this 26th installment of the Maigret series by Georges Simenon, the detective chief inspector is retired and living peacefully but perhaps a bit restlessly in the country when an elderly woman bursts in on his idyll and demands he investigate a family matter. Jules can't resist, and the story proceeds to dissect human impulses driven by the third deadly sin, avarice. In the process, Simenon shows how bad behavior by the rich may be more disgusting than "ordinary" crimes.