Smiley's People is the last book in le Carré's Karla Trilogy, begun in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and continued in The Honourable Schoolboy.

George Smiley is called back from retirement when one of his former contacts, a Russian general turned emigré, is found murdered. Working alone and exercising his con­sid­er­able tradecraft, Smiley discovers a fatal chink in the armor of his old adversary, Karla, the Russian spymaster. He gets the go-ahead to execute a sting, which will ultimately lead to Karla's defection.

Once again, le Carré crafts a subtle and …continue.

Tom Janeway lives in Seattle with his wife Beth and their four-year-old son, Finn. Tom is a middle-aged Englishman who teaches writing at the University of Wash­ing­ton; Beth, somewhat younger, is an editor at GetAShack.com. It's 1999 and the DotCom boom is raging. Chick is an illegal immigrant from China, with a raging en­tre­pre­neur­ial streak, who ends up wandering in and out of Tom's life.

Tom is perceptive enough to be an occasional com­men­ta­tor on NPR's All Things Considered, yet oblivious to the problems in his marriage, and he's flab­ber­gast­ed when Beth leaves …continue.

Days before graduation, a shooting takes place in the girls' bathroom at a suburban Maryland high school. The popular, pretty Kat is dead; the athletic Josie was shot in the foot; and the drama star and shooter, Perri, is comatose after shooting herself in the head. The three girls had been in­sep­a­ra­ble since third grade, though Perri and Kat had fallen out the previous summer. What happened? What led Perri to such an act?

Lippman builds a compelling story, weaving together the aftermath and the events leading up to …continue.

More than two thousand years ago, the balance of power shifted, Africa became the dominant continent, and Europe stayed a barbarian backwater. Muslim Africans sailed west and conquered America, using white slaves as a workforce.

Aidan O'Dere was kidnapped as a boy from an Irish fishing village, and sold to the Wakil, the governor of what would otherwise be Galveston. The Wakil's younger son, Kai, is the same age as Aidan. The Wakil and Kai are sensitive men, warriors with poets' souls, with misgivings about the in­sti­tu­tion of slavery. Their respective …continue.

Sequel to Living Dead in Dallas.

Sookie's vampire boyfriend, Bill, has gone missing and seems to have had an affair with another vampire. To get him back—and she's not sure she wants him back—she must go undercover among the vampire glitterati of Jackson, Mis­sis­sip­pi. She retrieves him eventually, but not without some physical battering, and emotional upheaval as she finds herself attracted to another vampire and a very nice werewolf.

En­ter­tain­ing, often funny, oc­ca­sion­al­ly touching. Harris offers an amusing and original ex­pla­na­tion for why Elvis continues to be …continue.

Three short novels, extracted from longer stories published elsewhere.

Ms. Mid­ship­woman Harrington by David Weber is a prequel to the Honor Harrington novels. Harrington is a mid­ship­woman in the Royal Navy of Manticore, on her first tour of duty out in a pirate-infested area. She survives the hazing of a par­tic­u­lar­ly brutal and stupid superior. When half the bridge is blown away by a pri­va­teer's attack, she manages to save the day.

Islands by Eric Flint is extracted from one of the …continue.

Mary-Mathilda has been the mistress of Bellfeels, a plantation owner in Bimshire (a lightly fic­tion­al­ized Barbados), since her early teens. One night, she calls the police to confess a crime. Sargeant, who has silently loved her since they were children, takes her Statement over the course of a very long, discursive night. A night in which many ugly secrets bubble to the surface. Secrets about Mary-Mathilda's past, secrets about the English elite who ruled pre-War Bimshire, secrets about the plantation: secrets that Sargeant doesn't really want to hear.

An odd, meandering novel that …continue.

Anyone who has attempted to build a Web Service has come away scarred by the complexity of all the WS-* standards. Heavy­weight standards that in many ways reinvent earlier dis­trib­uted object tech­nolo­gies like CORBA and DCOM, providing Remote Procedure Calls over HTTP. The promised in­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty hasn't really happened: a web service built with one stack of tools may or may not be consumable by another stack.

A movement has arisen in the last few years, arguing for RESTful Web Services: lighter­weight services built on top …continue.

The Nightside: the dark, mysterious, sleazy place under the city of London, where you can find anything or lose yourself. Monsters lurk there, demons slum there, John Taylor grew up there. Taylor has a gift. He can find anything in Nightside.

Taylor exiled himself five years ago. Now he's making a precarious living as a private eye in London. A distraught busi­ness­woman hires him to find her teenage daughter, who was last seen heading for Nightside. Taylor finds the girl alright, and he finds plenty of trouble along the way.

En­ter­tain­ing …continue.

Francesco di Marco Datini was born in Prato in 1335 and died there without an heir in 1410. Prato is a small town in Tuscany, about 10 miles from Florence. Then, as now, Prato was in Florence's shadow. At the age of fifteen with only a few florins to his name, Francesco ap­pren­ticed himself to a merchant in Avignon, then home of the Papal court. Thirty-three years later, he returned to Prato, a wealthy man.

Throughout his career, he was an inveterate letter writer, spending hours a day writing to …continue.