Missive #480 Published 16 April 2025

Rome, 799 AD: Pope Leo is viciously attacked in the street by unknown assailants. Sigwulf, a Saxon prince who has been banished to the court of King Carolus in Frankia, is sent to Rome as a spy to discover who was responsible. There, he discovers a web of lies—the only clue to the attackers' identity is an intricate gold buckle, which Sigwulf links with a mysterious gold warrior flagon he finds in the home of the Pope's chamberlain.

his book was the last in the Saxon series and is the last of Severin's books that I have to read. I must say that I liked his fiction better than his nonfiction adventure books although they were very good.

Missive #479 Published 14 April 2025

In this stunning book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

Missive #476 Published 9 April 2025

It was almost a decade ago that Least Heat-Moon (Blue Highways ) followed the trail of Lewis and Clark in River Horse ; in the first section of his latest peripatetic writings, he and his wife, Q, trace the lesser-known Dunbar-Hunter Expedition of 1804 through the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase, searching out the head of the Ouachita River in Arkansas. Least Heat-Moon's fans will find this territory, and that covered in the five other “journeys to places a goodly portion of the American populace would call 'nowhere,' ” instantly familiar, as he and various companions take digressive paths from one small opolis (“where anything metro was clearly missing”) to the next in search of “quoz” (an 18th-century word meaning “anything out of the ordinary”).

Missive #473 Published 3 April 2025

A loving mother. A notorious murderer. They both have reasons to hide their secrets in a novel of escalating shock and suspense by New York Times bestselling author A. R. Torre. Perla Wultz lives with her husband, Grant, and their precious daughter, Sophie, in a gated Pasadena community. Affluent, sociable, and accomplished, Perla plays the part of loving wife and mother to perfection.This is another good suspense book, not as good as The Wronged Sons or The Patient’s Secret. I’ll be adding the author to my To Read list and see what some of her other books might be like. It seems an ideal life, if not for a decades-old crime that has become Perla’s dark and consuming secret obsession.

Missive #472 Published 1 April 2025

What would you do if the person you loved suddenly vanished into thin air? Catherine’s cosy life as a housewife and mum-of-three is quickly thrown into disarray when husband Simon disappears without explanation. She is convinced he hasn’t left by choice as confusion and spiraling debts threaten to tear her family apart.