I trudged along a canal in Berlin back in 2011, hoping to see the inside of one of the few remaining watchtowers in the city—a guard tower where East Berlin soldiers kept an eagle eye out for people escaping to West Berlin. The guards had shoot-to-kill orders. When...
I did an interview on my Berlin novel, "The Puzzle People," this past week in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall came down on November 9, 1989, when an East German bureaucrat accidentally announced the immediate opening of...
One hundred and fifty years ago this week, on February 17, 1864, a Confederate submarine made the first successful attack in history, sinking the USS Housatonic while trying to break the Federal blockade during the Civil War. Like a bee inserting its stinger and then...
Timothy Webster, the most famous spy during the first year of the Civil War, first encountered the Lincoln League when he was taken to a secluded hideout in the woods. He was taken there by the African American spy, John Scobell--the hero of my new novel, The Lincoln...
Print copies of the The Lincoln League are now available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sources. It's also available as an e-book on Kindle, Nook, and iBook. The Lincoln League is based on the life of John Scobell, one of the first African American...
You can now purchase my new novel, The Lincoln League, in e-book formats--Kindle, iBook, and Nook. The Lincoln League is inspired by the true story of John Scobell, one of the first African American spies for the U.S. intelligence service. The novel also follows the...
Over the centuries, some people have believed that just about anybody but William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. People have credited the plays to Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Walter Raleigh, but the most famous theory is that the plays were...
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...
HISTORY BY THE SLICE--Washington socialite Rose Greenhow was arrested for spying for the Confederacy on August 23, 1861, 151 years ago today. Greenhow's information on Union troop movements was believed to have aided the Confederate victory at the first Battle of Bull...