THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4), interwar Bonding

THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4)
WILLIAM FERNIE
Fernie Publishing Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Before the Luftwaffe terrorised Europe, it was forged in secrecy.

In the uneasy peace before WWII, Captain Tom Munro is flying for Deutsche Luft Hansa when he uncovers a clandestine military airfield hidden deep within Soviet Russia.

Coerced into supporting Germany's secret rearmament programme, he risks his life flying experimental aircraft and developing new, untested operational techniques all prohibited under the Treaty of Versailles. This test flying provides a unique opportunity to gather military intelligence of immense value to the British Secret Intelligence Service.

But Tom knows that he will not be allowed to survive with this vital intelligence and must attempt the impossible: escape with Germany's secrets before he disappears forever.

An interwar aviation/espionage thriller for readers of David Downing, Philip Kerr and Robert Harris.

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My Review: Tom Munro is a very enjoyable PoV to follow as this based-on-facts thriller of Nazi Germany's preparations for war in the air. The prior three volumes in the series deal with the Great War, the Treaty of Versailles era, and now the period that enables the rise of the Nazi state.

It's a period I'm very interested in, and one that saw gigantic advances inn aeronautical engineering, materials science, and other sciences that are useful in wartime. As always it's the horrors of slaughter that drive change, and the economy's growth, and the terrible Othering of people in no way wrong, bad, or evil as the scum at the top try to justify the war "They" want by manufacturing enemies within and without.

What makes Tom fun to follow is mostly his test-pilot nous. It's fun for me to read about the planes realy being tested, really being studied in this pre-Depression time that has so much hope for a peaceful future that recedes and recedes while Tom and his ilk try to keep it alive. Yet here he is flying violation-of-treaty equipment to a secret base! One in Russia, no less...more serious skulduggery...and consequences for Tom in terms of using spycraft for...good?

Come for the history, stay for the gearhead talk, which you'll need to be getting along with that to be in the full story. I was captivated, you might not be, so be aware the jargon is plentiful and needed to make sense of the Lipetsk Russian airfield subplot. There are many politicosocial developments but they almost all incorporate technology and discussion of same.

There is yearning for his lost, belovèd fellow spy Alice, which is getting a bit wearing if I'm honest. Oh well. One must have a woman in a thriller, she motivates the main man. *sigh*

A complex and very very sensitive matter, Germany's resurgent ambitions and rebounding desire to lead the technological world, and the worries of her very recent opponents all buried in piles of dead people from that stupid war. And an ending to this story that's exactly right. All designed to give this old man reader the happy.

Be ready for the complexities on multiple fronts and it might do the same trick for you.

A RESISTANCE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, from Bookshop.org's Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction list all summer long

A RESISTANCE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
TAD STOERMER
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending August 25, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An urgent, bracing new look at American history that Ava DuVernay calls "deeply necessary for this moment."

Revisit the Salem Witch Trials, the Underground Railroad, and other resistance movements of American history to get a bold new understanding of how resistance shaped our past—and how its principles can change our future.

The United States was shaped by resistance—but not in the way we’ve been taught. The Revolution did not secure liberty; it opened the door to either liberty or oppression, where only white men enjoyed all of the benefits and protections of citizenship.

In A Resistance History of the United States, public historian Tad Stoermer shows how from the very beginning, that tension—between the ideals of resistance and the realities of power—has defined America more than the Enlightenment ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Utililizing powerful storytelling to focus on key—and often lesser-known—moments in American history, this book reveals the truth of how resistance movements from Colonial times have opposed the powers that be. Stoermer covers an impressive roster of pivotal movements, with each chapter identifying a key resistance movement and principle meant to inspire contemporary readers, including:

Bacon’s Rebellion/Metacomet’s War (1676)

Salem Witch Trials (1692)

The Black Loyalists (1783)

The Underground Railroad (1850)

Through these and many more examples, Stoermer dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history—exposing the curated nostalgia, moral evasions, and institutional silences that have long protected abusive power. What emerges is an essential look at how we can take lessons from the past to understand, and effectively respond to, the injustices we face today.

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My Review: There's a reason this story has been on the Bookshop.org non-fiction bestseller list since who-kicked-the-cat. It's organized like the podcast-a-holics like it, event by event. More like a podcast script collection than a narrative history, it is nonetheless a nevessary document of how *structural* change can get made.

I myownself don't think that's the only kind that counts, where the author does.

I'm far more annoyed by the absence of footnotes/inline citations in a serious work of non-fiction. Surely in the Age of AI it would be the work of but a moment to get that done! By itself, that was one star gone. I'm not convinced the choice of political changes enshrined in law was as restrictive as the author's use of it requires. To use my own pet peeve, where's the gay-marriage part? Where's the Homestead Strike?

So not perfect but way way better, more corrective, than the triumphalist claptrap that's extruded by the yard from more mainstram publishers. Steerforth Press does interesting work all the time even when I quibble with it. This is a fine example of that reality.

I think most readers would prefer to ear-read the book, as it plays into the podcasting ethos of it.

THE DEPOPULATION, interesting fictional treatment of factual event

THE DEPOPULATION
MARINA CLOSS (tr. Thomas Bunstead)
Bellevue Literary Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From a major new talent in Latin American literature comes a tale of cultures, languages, spirits, and the natural world on the brink of transformation

“Of all the happy, hermitic lands, the Guayrá was the jewel.”

So begins this polyphonic wonder of a novel set in a 17th-century Jesuit mission founded within the wild South American subtropics by the mystical and intense Father Ruiz and his assistant Father Maceta. As the priests seek to convert the indigenous Guaraní and unravel the many religious mysteries that surround them, the harmony of their community is abruptly upended by the arrival of Overá, who announces himself as the Son of God and younger brother of Jesus. But an even larger threat presents itself when word arrives that European marauders and slave hunters will soon descend upon the peaceful mission, compelling Overá and the priests to launch a mass exodus into the heart of the jungle.

Full of humor, passion, and terror, The Depopulation brilliantly evokes the moment when modernity’s spark set fire to a still-magic world.

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My Review: A story of two halves: in the beginning were words describing a vanished jungle world, evoking heat humidity and the stunning void of loss and emptiness...I was utterly drawn into this world, so much so that my summer shirt-changing schedule ramped up. So sweaty in sympathy was I that I couldn't read the story in bed for obvious reasons. The evocation of the world where the colonizers and the colonized agreed that god(s) speak to us and through some of us they choose left me rapt.

Comes the arrival of Overá and the languid, interesting story of these spiritual imperialists trying to fill a void...a void of hierarchy...turns slower, because the focus stops being on Ruiz and Maceta working to learn about and build over the world they've chosen to be in. This is also when the main body of colonizers, rapacious boring caricatures to a man, arrive to rape, pillage, and clap.

It's ironic that my favorite part was when the spiritual imperialists were center stage. Given my antipathy to the religion the men were foisting on already traumatized people, it does not make any sense to me that the secular depredations, more kinetic in their lineaments, should be the part where my attention flagged. The truth is, if the focus had shifted to the acts and actions of these horrifying greed-machines in action, I'd've put the book down never to be picked up again. Tale as old as time, beauty destroyed by beasts; I've read it, no need for more.

Author Closs titled the book accurately. The story of these white-savior priests leading the great unwashed (in the blood of The Lamb, repulsive image that is) native people away from the slavers and the greedy just...well, it felt try-hard. They're good for trying to use their knowledge of what the colonizers are up to as a means to protect their charges from it.

It's the "their charges" bit that sorta messes up my pleasure in the story. Overá (it feels like there's a Portuguese pun in that name, I'm sure of it, something like "truth-teller" or "honest guy" but it can't quite form in my mind because I don't know enough) and his delusions popped me out of the story because my frame of reference...I've known schizophrenic men, with delusions they're certain are THE Truth, so Overá is familiar to me. The flipside of familiarity in this case is lack of ability to see through the story's deistic-sovereignty lens. I see through my twenty-first century mental-illness lens the disordered thinking of a paranoid person's delusions.

So it really frustrated me not to continue to be swept away, yet that was what I experienced. The language Translator Bunstead used to present the ideas was lushly evocative. It seems likely to me that most others will not be so rigidly entrenched in psychotheraputic ideas as to be unable to set aside the twenty-first century long enough to immerse themselves in the sixteenth. It was a lovely visit for me, just a mite too short to last all story long.

While I was there, I had a lovely time. I hope you'll get into the depopulating Amazon and stay for the full ride.

THE CAMINO, Anglophone debut of Dutch-language suspense star

THE CAMINO
ANYA NIEWIERRA (tr.Eileen Stevens)
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5- of five

The Publisher Says: From the Netherlands’s most popular crime writer, a literary thriller following a woman who walks the Camino de Santiago, searching for answers about her husband’s death.

Forty-four-year-old chocolatier Lotte Bonnet has been living happily in South Limburg for years with her husband Emil, a former refugee from Bosnia. But when Emil unexpectedly dies by suicide while walking the Camino de Santiago, or Way of Saint James, Lotte is devastated.

Shocked and confused, Lotte resolves to follow Emil’s exact path on the Camino one year later, hoping for answers, or at least insights into what could have compelled him to take his own life. While walking the arduous trail through central France, passing idyllic villages and meeting fellow pilgrims, Lotte’s thoughts are also elsewhere, in Sarajevo, as she learns the terrors of a war and shocking secrets about her husband’s identity.

Inspired by the natural beauty that surrounds her, forming new friendships, and possibly a romantic connection on the Camino, Lotte is distracted as the trail grows more treacherous, and as it becomes clear someone is following her, someone who does not want her to know the truth.

Fans of Louise Penny’s Inspector Armand Gamache will be delighted by Lotte’s easy charm and enthralled by the revelations on her journey. Anya Niewierra’s blockbuster mystery The Camino has taken Europe by storm and is finally available in English for the first time.

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My Review: I was dazzled.

It wasn't always *comfortable* reading but it was always to-the-point, even when it felt like it might not be. Every detail does indeed serve a purpose. There are dreadful deeds done in the past from the framework of the novel, that are definitely not for the fainthearted. I *strongly* discourage readers whose tolerance doe not extend to child harm not to read this book at all.

I'm not at all clear that the story's a thriller by my own lights. I'd call it an historical mystery/suspense novel that examines recent European history from a grieving woman's perspective; Lotte's decision to go on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage as a means of discovering her late husband Emil's secrets felt...forced...until I sank into the full implications of pilgrimage.

Her discoveries about her husband of a quarter century are, well, intense and not at all expected. It's a truth in any intimate relationship that there are unspoken things; mostly unspoken because they're not really important.

Not this time.

The Spoiler Stasi being among the nastiest of hazards on the internet, I won't detail the discoveries she makes; the CWs will be enough to warn the sensitive. I began my read aware of a few details so I was prepared, but I reiterate for clarity that you must heed the CWs.

The issues that arise as Lotte retraces the Way of St, James in the present are treated in a way that was very suspenseful...I worried for her safety from the time she decided to undertake her parallel pilgrimage, since Emil's suicide was at best suspicious. The bad stuff that happens is very well designed, in that it makes the stakes of her rash decision that much more obvious as each instance of near-miss violence more obviously targeted.

The why that we eventually learn for these events is fully explanatory. It changes the game for Lotte and for the reader as we learn why Emil's secrets and his lies are revealed to Lotte, and why that revelation is so deeply disturbing to the unseen others on her trail following his trail.

If the CWs make you nervous, read the book, because the resolution/revelations are well worth it. If they leave you deeply upset merely reading the words, do not touch the book at all.

It proved to me that Author Niewierra deserves her European fame as a creator of suspenseful stories.

PORTRAIT OF A WITCH UNDONE, charming and fun and amusing

PORTRAIT OF A WITCH UNDONE
K.S. SHAY
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 ebook, preorder now for delivery 25 August 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thirteen stolen works of art. One haunted marsh.
And a Boston witch willing to risk everything for the friend she’s already failed.

An atmospheric, eerie debut for readers of Starling House and A Discovery of Witches, Isabella Stewart Gardner art heist aficionados, witchy girls, burnt-out former gifted kids, New England history buffs, the coven curious, ride-or-die friends, folklore fanatics, and anyone who’s ever wanted to wander through the looking glass.

Once, Maeve Ryan was the strongest witch of her generation. But Maeve messed up a spell to contact the Lady of the Fens, an eerie Revenant who lures the unwary to their deaths in the brackish marshlands of the North Shore. Maeve destroyed her reputation, hurt her best friend Ash, and tainted herself with unbound, wild magic that transforms witches into insane Revenants.

With unbound power eating away at Maeve’s mind, all she wants is to get rid of her magic. Forever. But Ash’s research into how the spell went awry leads in an unexpected direction: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and a link between the Lady and a decades-old art theft worth $500 million. When Ash disappears through a stolen painting’s empty frame, Maeve has to follow.

Inside is the Other Marsh, a haunting, deadly realm where only the Lady’s rules apply. Within this half-world lie secrets about North Shore’s history, Maeve’s failure, and the fate of the masterpieces that disappeared over three decades ago. But as Maeve fights toward the truth, she risks her friendship, her coven, and her life against enemies hiding in plain sight.

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My Review: The hardcover might be preferable to order, y'all:

Are these endsheets to die for or what?

And then there are the seven maps that this bloody program will not let me upload; just know that they'll enhance your reading experience for the mappish among you, like me. They're there because this is an undertaking to explain the long-ago, still unsolved, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. After almost forty years, I think it's safe to say the solution presented here...it's magic...might as well become the final word. Nothin' else but the death of some powerful people will bust open the truth and maybe not even then, so heck...why not magic?

Maeve, all of twenty-three during this story, is a really interesting magical practitioner. She's filled with insecurity after very publicly failing at an important working that unintentionally hurts her bestie in the Salem coven. This is the woman who still comes to her rescue when the cursed apartment she lives in is overrun by frogs...without harming the frogs. It was refreshing. Not a frog-fancier, me, but I do get the joke about witches who famously use frogs in magical working that don't turn out well for the frogs subverting that silly stereotype. Also subversive of stereotypes is the way these witches actually *fly*on*their*brooms* and still don't play it for a cheap snigger.

There's a male main character. He is Maeve's "love interest." Nothing about this part of the plot adds anything very interesting to the story. I'm moving on. The interplay among the coven members really exemplifies the use...bordering on overuse...of the miscommunication among people who have one big thing in common but little else drawing them together. It's a problem as the mystery of the art heist steadily takes over the coven's activities; the stolen artworks are, like much art, imbued with magical capability of being bridges between worlds. Maeve is forced to do her best magic in the scenes where she's working to focus everyone on the common goal of regaining these stolen portals. May not be all spells but it's for sure magic.

Maeve has the chops innate in her to be a leader, but she's twenty-three. The action spins out of her control as we-the-reader watch, amused and bemused, while the coven attempts solving the heist for their own, not-law-enforcing, purposes. It is clear Maeve could become the focus of a series with her coven as they redress imbalances and resolve mysteries. I hope they all come back soon. I also hope potential future lovely, fun reads will show Maeve grow into her leadership and not rely on the chaos that comes from poor communication again. Magic carries in its basis the wildness and chaos of Life, untrammelled; Maeve can shape that, can form it...if she's written that way.

Debuts seldom come with this much promise. Hope it's pointed in a positive way.

GHOST CITIES: A Novel, the trade of creating illusions at apotheosis

GHOST CITIES: A Novel
SIANG LU
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 25 August 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning international rising star, a dazzlingly inventive novel, spanning ancient and modern China, that interweaves stories of romance and showbiz

Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of the eccentric film director Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao’s movie, based on ancient legends, is to be filmed in one of China’s “ghost cities”.

How is his relocation to a ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed—then recreated, page by page and book by book—all in the name of love and art?

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My Review: Xiang Lu...notice the author's first name's first letter is the sole difference in these names...is a man with excellent luck. Blagging his way into a job at the Sydney, Australia, consulate of China based on ethnicity and the ubiquity of Google Translate; getting fired when his incompetence at Chinese-language skills is exposed and then pilloried on social media; thereupon being discovered by a Chinese equivalent to Roger Corman, and getting hired to do the publicity on the guy's new film...no way could that be an unfolding, subtle plan on Xiang Lu's part, too much could go too wrong.

After joining Director "Baby Bao" in Port Man Tou, one of the infamous ghost cities of the title, Xiang Lu and Bao join a cast of thousands, and the spirits of Emperor Lu Huang Du and his willed-into-being alters across the multiverse. (Say the "Chinese" names aloud, more than once and with an approximate Aussie accent. It's a hoot.) The Wikipedia articles I've linked to offer some background will also afford a flattering angle of light on this slightly-too-long story, and should be read as they appear for best results. This story is subtle, is layered with jeux d'esprit, and that's the problem. Humor, satire oh dear oh my, is tough to convince people to read. Tristram Shandy and Candide aren't read as often as they're bought; and this skewering of the overweening egos that, in fact, summon their creators' visions into a weird kind of being is not at that celestial level.

Siang Lu is the 2025 Miles Franklin Award–winning author of this odd confection of past and present, reality as we know it and the self-aggrandizing reality-dismissing fantasies of two powerful creators of images. The Miles Franklin Award resembles the US Pulitzer Prize in that it is "...an annual literary prize awarded to 'a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases'." So we know the author is either born or based in Australia; the utter absence of any indication of a translator on this or his first novel, The Whitewash (no US publisher, but available on Ammy's Kindle via the Aussie publisher University of Queensland Press), and the fact he "holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney" all rather makes me think he either writes novels directly in English or her self-translates his work. Author Lu also "...has written for television on Malaysia's Astro network. In 2021, {he} won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer for The Whitewash. He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia," (all from his Goodreads bio) so I'm betting he's pretty thoroughly polygot; there's no way in hell this read was made using Google Translate! So the opposite of Xiang Lu he writes in this novel, in other words.

As a story it was fun to read the ever-increasing parallel delusions of Baby Bao and Lu Huang Du, and those delusions' assuming a mirror corporeality and a deeply unsettling unity of purpose. It says so much about the visionaries of the world who dream big and act small and petty. Xiang and Baby Bao's assistant/translator/enabler Yuan (I believe this is a word for cash, get it?) are endlessly discussing how eerie it is that all Portmanteau...I mean Port Man Tou, of course I do!...are so indistinguishable, in their empty expensiveness, chewing over how it takes a powerful mind to snatch low-hanging fruit before others seize it...well, it's all very undergrad-philosophy, very obvious and ye I am absolutely certain that it will zoom over most heads like the starship Enterprise.

Maybe I'm just letting my inner old snob run the show. It made me snerk and chortle and even nod along once in a while. It's a good story, and a fine read. I'm not rating it a full five because I suspect most target readers will feel lost at key moments.

"You know," she {Yuan} says, looking out the window, "I have always had this silly thought that maybe, somehow, every city is the same. So when you go from one place to another, it's simply an illusion of flight. The take-off and landing is a simulation. In reality, you've never left the ground, or maybe you have, but are simply flying around in circles for hours, waiting for the new city to 'load.'"

Either too obvious or too weird or too simplistic, but too-too is likely to be a common response. I'm glad Author Siang made the story and that Simon & Schuster's international-lit imprint brought it out here in the US because it's the kind of story that skewers the pretensions and pretentiousness of people badly in need of it.

I'm so glad this story's coming out now, before the US version of #Jólabókaflóð that we prosaically call "fall new book releases" but are really the Yuletide rush. It could get buried now, of course, but I hope some few of y'all will see the appeal and feel the need to chortle along with Siang Lu and me.

GREAT AND UNFORTUNATE THINGS, the last words we will hear from the late JASON ARDAY

GREAT AND UNFORTUNATE THINGS
JASON ARDAY with Eve Claxton
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: With the power of Educated and the emotional sweep of When Breath Becomes Air, Great and Unfortunate Things is the inspiring, underdog story of how an autistic, non-verbal boy who society had all but given up on found his voice, literally and figuratively, became one of the youngest professors in the University of Cambridge’s history and put himself in a position to give back.

Jason Arday was born the second youngest of three boys and grew up in a colorful and lively section of South London. At three years old, he was diagnosed with autism and development delays. Experts told his parents that he would never be able to speak, write, or live independently. An institution would best serve his needs, it was suggested.

His parents would have none of it. Instead, thinking outside the box and drawing on her faith, his extraordinary mother Giff embraced his neurodivergence and fiercely dedicated herself to helping her son realize a potential few others believed was possible. Giff drew on proverbs from her West African culture, popular music by the likes of Enya, and comedic television shows and movies to help Jason make sense of the world.

In Great and Unfortunate Things, we see how Arday went from being nonverbal until he was eleven and illiterate until eighteen to becoming a professor at Cambridge. Without romanticizing the struggle, it’s a story of a son’s determination against insurmountable odds and how his family and a band of ordinary people with extraordinary compassion joined forces to encourage Jason to believe in himself and maximize his capabilities.

This is the story we need right now, and Arday, who believes in paying it forward, is the kind of figure the world can use more of now more than ever.

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My Review: I avoided talking about this read after the tragic ending of the online attacks against Author Arday. It needs saying that this horrifying event should ever have happened, that it truly ought to reinforce in we-the-readers' mind that literally every accusation is a confession.

On to the read.

Someone needs to be enormously lucky to find people who offer this much support, this level of kind and sustained attention. Of course it didn't hurt that Author Arday was an attractive young man, and clearly quite charismatic. It was a case of luck coinciding with fertile ground for the luck to take effective root in. A tutor who committed his time and effort to help his fellow student pursue a huge goal, college graduation, after only very recently learning to read and write because a co-worker (later girlfriend, then wife) taught him to do so using readily available phonics courses? Support pouring in for a publicly documented goal of running 30 marathons in 35 days...a goal he achieved as the public record shows? It was an extraordiary life lived in a very public and vocal way. t is aways sad when allegations are assumed to be enough proof to, from the outside, judge a person guilty of misconduct. There is nothing like overachieving to attract scrutiny, but it's not always as dire as sensational headlines make it sound.

Its tragic ending ought to be the impetus for this inspiring, if somewhat gee-whiz in tone, story to climb bestseller lists. It is a sin and a shame the reason it is now likely to be the bestseller it's always, on its merits, deserved to be. A tarnished reputation is not a reason to think less of the real and difficult achievements of an imperfect, ambitious man.