Cryptography in seventeenth-century England was not just the stuff of spies and traitors, a fact that became a major plot point in The Sign of the Gallows, my fifth Lucy Campion historical mystery. While ciphers had grown more complex between the 16th and 17th centuries with the development of new mathematics, the actual practice of…
At 80 million copies sold and counting, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is poised to surpass the current bestselling mystery of all time, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Clearly, Brown hit on something with his fourth novel: readers love to crack a code. Mix in a little romance and some heavy intrigue…
Dear Reader, Please accept this post as an invitation to consider Dr. Theophrastus Seuss, who would have been 112 years of age today if were still with us. We remember him as the creator of silly stories and pictures—it’s easy to forget their intent as a reminder of the importance of thinking outside the box…
Blood Ties by Nicholas Guild is a thriller pitting San Francisco homicide detective Ellen Ridley against a serial killer who she suspects of being a hacker and codebreaker with the U.S. Navy (available May 12, 2015). Women are everywhere in Blood Ties. It can sometimes seems as if women are totally MIA in crime thrillers,…
It's the story of a Columbian colonel, a Miami ad man, long-time hostages and the music of freedom. Colonel Espejo was running out of opportunities to rescue hostages held by the rural FARC, sometimes for more than a decade, so he turned to an ad man with a long-standing grudge against the guerillas to design…
No, this is not a still for BBC's Sherlock. This is an image from the upcoming Oscar's hopeful The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, and Charles Dance. Set during WWII, Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the man famously known for breaking the enigma code and allowing the Allied Forces to thwart Germany. Knightley plays…
It’s disconcerting to see Millie in distress. When her confidence is shaken so is ours. We know she has a perfectly good reason to feel traumatized. In last week’s episode of The Bletchley Circle, Millie stumbled upon the body of her happy-go-lucky pal Jasper, “co-pilot” in her scheme to provide cut-price luxury goods to fashionable…
What’s a girl gotta do to pay the bills? You’d think that being a gorgeous, vivacious smarty-pants fluent in multiple languages would make it a snap to find gainful employment. Millie (Rachael Stirling) would tell you otherwise. After the last Bletchley Circle caper left her with her government clearance rescinded, Millie has struggled to make…
We begin this episode in an unusual position: a step ahead of the women of the Bletchley Circle. A man is in the hospital, his body covered with ugly, blistery chemical burns. He’s expected to die, and when he does his cause of death will be falsified. We know this; our heroines don’t. So we…
The first series of The Bletchley Circle reminded us that sisterhood is powerful. So it’s no surprise when Jean (Julie Graham) feels compelled to defend the innocence of a former Bletchley Park codebreaker, even when the woman refuses to defend herself. It’s 1953, ten years after Jean crossed paths with Alice Merren (Hattie Morahan) at…
