Irregulars Hits a Best of 2013 List in the USA...Where It Still Ain't Published! (J'accuse!)

Been a long time folks.  Out with the old and in with the new and all that.  Just a quick post here with a link to the Kirkus Reviews site where Irregulars has been chosen as one of J. Kingston Pierce's Top Ten Crime Fiction Reads of 2013.  It's a serious honour as Mr Pierce knows his stuff, being the curator of the seminal Rap Sheet blog.  He's one of the best in the business, is Mr Pierce.  Gracias, sir!
 

Here's the link:  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/postmortem-tagging-my-10-favorite-crime-novels-201/

Zola's Courageous Attack on the Army
for Wrongly Convicting Dreyfuss of Treason Historical Fiction at its FinestAlso got a chance over the holidays to catch up on some novels I've been wanting to read for awhile but wanted to savour.  Any fan of historical fiction could do far worse than Robert Harris's new tome on the Dreyfuss Affair, An Officer and a Spy.
 Much like the story of the assassination of Heydrich in HHhH that I wrote about in a previous post, I knew the bare bones of the Dreyfuss affair--Zola's involvement, the antisemitism rife in the French Army and right wing press at the end of the 19th Century etc.--but I didn't know the details and ultimately, the outcome.  Harris does not invent characters or events in the book--dialogue and some incident, I imagine, but according to his afterward, he sticks as close to the published record as he can to explore the case.  The result is a novel, an historical thriller, that is gripping to the end and at times, very well written.  A totally different approach to historical fiction than that taken by Binet in his HHhH and equally fine in my opinion.  More than one way to skin a novel!