The Greatest Escape

The Greatest Escape

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...

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The Puzzle People on CBS in Champaign

The Puzzle People on CBS in Champaign

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...

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The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle

The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle

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...

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Canton Comes Through Again

Canton Comes Through Again

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...

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History by the Slice