Jackson Coppley's Blog

Bruce Rule breathes new life into the Sherlock Holmes novels with The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - The Debutante Detective. Set in 1905, it pairs Holmes and Dr. Watson with the real-life Alice Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s famously independent daughter, in a transatlantic political mystery. But first, the game is afoot in England. Thieves stole a letter containing sensitive information about upcoming Japan-Russia peace negotiations while Alice dazzled London society....

You may recall my review of David Baldacci’s Nash Falls. I finished that novel last February, only to find out it was half the story, and I had to wait until April to read the rest of the story. Now I have. It’s contained in the novel Hope Rises. I thought the first book, Nash Falls, sounded like a small town in Vermont. I was wrong. It is about the fall of Walter Nash. This financier experiences a life-altering unraveling, through no fault of his own. To avenge his daughter's death by a...

A.G. Riddle’s Labyrinth is a near‑future sci‑fi thriller about a widowed Marine veteran whose mysterious tinnitus episodes and visions of numbers pull him into a secretive experiment in virtual reality and AI that threatens his family and, ultimately, the wider world. The featured character, Alan Norris, is a former Marine who lost part of his leg and developed tinnitus after an IED blast; he now teaches middle‑school history and is raising his young daughter alone after his wife’s death...

Contour Press is Proud to Announce a New Book: This third book by John Steinmetz contains ten intriguing short stories that explore the best and the worst of our shared humanity. Bravery and cowardice, love and hate, honor and disgrace, faith and doubt, all intermingle throughout the stories to expose the complexities of the human condition. It takes the reader on a march through time, starting in 1859 and concluding in 2135. It is a journey worth taking. You won’t regret it. For Information...

My introduction to Janet Evanovich was her novel The Recovery Agent . That book is of the action/adventure genre I write. It turns out that's only a two-book series by Evanovich. I just read Now or Never.  That work by Evanovich is the last entry in a more prolific series of 31—Stephanie Plum Mysteries.   And it’s a hoot.   Stephanie juggles a chaotic slate of fugitives while facing the most serious crossroads of her personal life: she is accidentally engaged to both Joe Morelli and Ranger...

You may know Jake Tapper from CNN. Jake has now turned out a book, Race Against Terror , that reads like a novel.   The book is Tapper’s true-crime-style account of the effort to prosecute an al Qaeda operative, Spin Ghul, after he unexpectedly surrendered in Italy in 2011 and confessed to killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. The book follows federal prosecutors and investigators as they race to build a case with evidence from a long-past battlefield, while also showing the broader...

Warning: This book ends leaving it to a sequel to finish the story. The sequel will not be available until April14, 2026.   With that said, when you finish the book, you see how Baldacci has crafted a bad-ass fighter through something of a metamorphosis. So, I’ll try not to put spoilers in this review.   Basically, Nash Falls  is a corporate thriller about Walter Nash, a high‑level executive at Sybaritic Investments whose comfortable life implodes when he’s coerced into spying on his own firm...

Contempt of Court  is the second Charlie Trust legal thriller by Jake Needham, following Habeas Corpus . It continues the story of Charlie Trust, a burned‑out American lawyer drawn back into legal and moral conflict in Southern California in the early 1990s.   In the story, the man lending Charlie his beach house in Malibu has a favor to ask. How can he refuse? After all, the man is lending Charlie a fantastic place on the Pacific next door to Ryan O’Neil and Farrah Fawcett. The favor is to...

1929 is a narrative history of the 1929 stock market crash and its aftermath, told through the experiences of key financiers and political leaders.  It traces how exuberant speculation, regulatory neglect, and overconfident elites pushed the U.S. economy to the brink, triggering the Great Depression and reshaping the relationship between Wall Street and Washington.   Sorkin spends the first half of the book painting a market in which everyone wanted a brass ring dispensed by the New York...

In The Widow , John Gresham returns to his legal drama roots. The novel follows Simon Latch, a small‑town lawyer drowning in gambling debts, a failing marriage, and a lackluster practice built on minor cases that barely pay his bills. He experiences a change of fortune when elderly widow Eleanor "Netty" Barnett, a rich woman, hires him to manage her estate.   Seeing a chance to escape his financial ruin, Simon ingratiates himself with Eleanor, becomes her trusted adviser, and positions...