BBC Radio 4 ran a compelling show last Friday about The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle--the shredded documents that form the core of my novel, The Puzzle People. As the Berlin Wall was coming down so dramatically in 1989, East German secret police, the Stasi, began shredding...
One of the highlights of 2011 was the One Book, One Community program in Canton, Ohio, which adopted The Disappearing Man as its featured book. The Canton Repository newspaper continues its support with a nice article about my Berlin mystery, The Puzzle People. Check...
Why Is Brezhnev Kissing Honecker on The Berlin Wall? It's called "The Kiss"Â or "The Kiss of Death."Â And it is perhaps the most famous image that appears in Berlin's East Side Gallery--a nearly mile-long mile stretch of the Berlin Wall. What's left of the Wall,...
The Puzzle People and the Trouble with Trabis The votes are in, and East Germany's Trabant has been named the 9th worst car of all time, according to Edmunds.com. Much of my new novel, The Puzzle People, takes place in East Berlin during the Cold War, so the Trabant...
Bill Bryson Shines a Light on Rats and Other Pests in His History of the Home One of the scenes in my new novel, The Puzzle People, features an escape through the Berlin sewer system--a scene based on an actual escape that took place on October 12, 1961. In my version...
Solving a 600-Million-Piece Puzzle My new novel, The Puzzle People, hasn't quite hit the shelves yet. But it has hit the webosphere and is now available for download on Kindle, Nook, IBook, and other electronic formats. But exactly who were the Puzzle People? My novel...
A Bureaucrat's Mistake Led to the Fall of the Berlin Wall In a country loaded with bureaucrats, it seems oddly fitting that a bureaucratic blunder would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. To set the scene, the year was 1989, and the Soviet empire was unraveling. In...
Berlin Trip Takes Me to the Site of the First Shooting Along the Wall Talk about timing. I spent the last two weeks in Austria and Berlin, in part to do research for my new novel on the Berlin Wall, The Puzzle People (which explains why I have not done a blog for...
Big Brother Takes a Big Hit in 1989 George Orwell didn't quite get it right. His landmark novel, 1984, describes the 1980s as a time in which Big Brother is all-seeing and all-controlling. Little did he know that the 1980s would be better known for taking Big Brother...
How the Church Helped Bring Down the Berlin Wall With the last name of "Fuhrer,"Â he made an unlikely German hero. His full name was Christian Fuhrer, and this pastor led a movement that helped to bring down East Germany and the Berlin Wall. They called it "the...