Author: whatcathyreadnext

#WWWWednesday – 26th March 2025

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Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

What I’m Currently Reading

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree)

Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: feckless, jobless, in need of a distraction.

Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads.

They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food.

And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.

It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of.

What could possibly go wrong?

The CIA Book Club by Charlie English (William Collins via NetGalley)

For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.

No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.

Charlie English tells this true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA’s mastermind, who didn’t waver in his belief that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help free the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.

The Injustice of Valor by Gary Corbin (eARC, courtesy of the author)

When the bodies of freed sex offenders turn up with increasing regularity in western Connecticut, the Clayton Police Department responds with a disinterested yawn.

Second-year cop Val Dawes doesn’t share the department’s apparent indifference to the trend of vigilante justice. But her warnings fall on deaf ears, especially after her jealous rivals in the department get her suspended on a bogus assault charge.

Then her best friend in the department, a trans woman named Shelby, goes missing under suspicious circumstances.

Can Val find her friend before she, too, falls victim to a deranged vigilante?

What I’ve Just Read

The Ghosts of Paris by Tara Moss (Verve)

That Which May Destroy You by Abda Khan (Chiselbury)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Legionary: Devotio by Gordon Doherty (eARC, courtesy of the author)

AD 391: in the aftermath of civil war, the Roman Empire lies broken. The emperor is missing. Rumours fly that he has lost his mind. Sensing weakness, the Goths rise in revolt. All to the delight of the dark hand who orchestrated the civil war… and plots to stoke another.

Far out at sea, Pavo stands watchfully at the prow of the Justitia, running cargo between distant lands. At every port, he hears of the empire’s swelling troubles. Of fire and zeal and panic. Of legions, bristling for battle. But his days of protecting the provinces with sword and shield are over. He, his wife and his lad will soon have enough funds to make a home on a quiet island, far from the madness.

Yet the empire is an ever-hungry beast, and Pavo is about to sail straight into its jaws…

It is a journey that will take him to the brink, and throw down before him the question to which there is only one what would you sacrifice to save your loved ones?

An excerpt from The Injustice of Valor by Gary Corbin

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Publication day is always an exciting time for an author and today it’s the turn of Gary Corbin whose latest crime novel, The Injustice of Valor, hits the bookshops today. I’m delighted to bring you an excerpt from the book, which is the sixth outing for Officer Valorie Dawes of the Clayton Police Department. I’ve read several of the previous books in the series – A Better Part of Valor, Mother of Valor and Under the Banner of Valor – and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this one. (You can read my reviews by following the links from the titles.)

Gary is keen to support independent bookshops and to encourage readers to use alternatives to the big online retailers, including for ebooks and audiobooks. You can find more information on his website. Enough of the sales pitch, let’s find out more about the book…

About the Book

When the cops and courts fail, The Redeemer exacts his own form of justice.

When the bodies of freed sex offenders turn up with increasing regularity in western Connecticut, the Clayton Police Department responds with a disinterested yawn.

Second-year cop Val Dawes doesn’t share the department’s apparent indifference to the trend of vigilante justice. But her warnings fall on deaf ears, especially after her jealous rivals in the department get her suspended on a bogus assault charge.

Then her best friend in the department, a trans woman named Shelby, goes missing under suspicious circumstances.

Can Val find her friend before she, too, falls victim to a deranged vigilante?

Extract from The Injustice of Valor by Gary Corbin

The Wolf Moon ducked behind the clouds seconds after the power grid failed, plunging the small Berkshires town of Greenville, Connecticut into unexpected darkness. No home lights pierced the gloom. The seasoned veterans of year-round rural living, many of whom had already gone to bed, hadn’t yet switched over to their generators. The few still awake knew that these outages, so common in the mountains in winter, rarely lasted longer than a few minutes. Fewer still drove anywhere that late, so the winding roads like Torrington River Highway and Valley Park Drive remained unlit by glaring headlights.

It was the perfect time and place to dump a body.

The corpse splashed into the Torrington River’s swift current almost exactly midway between sunset and sunrise on the 14th of January, in the year 2020.

Stirred up by stiff winds and threatening rain, the river swallowed the body into its black depths within seconds, each crash of whitecaps against the surface an exclamation point to its haughty declaration: You are mine. Nothing but food for the fishes, more bones to litter its cluttered floor.

So it happened, anyway, in the imagination of The Redeemer, who dumped the body down the rocky embankment into the frothy cascades below. No time to wait around to see the fish devour the victim’s flesh. Unfortunate. To have seen the muscle and skin torn from bone would have been the evening’s crowning achievement. Ridding the planet of another sex offender who’d escaped justice, freed on some bullshit technicality argued by unethical lawyers, was a sight to be witnessed. Savored, even. Hell, the lawyers responsible for the perv’s freedom should join the fray.

Perhaps someday they would. In a perfect world, the event would be televised.

But not tonight. Tonight the world became a better place, with one less sicko to prey upon the innocent. One fewer person—or perhaps several—would risk the painful, humiliating experience of that almost unimaginable violation of their body.

Almost unimaginable. To the unlucky few, they were all too imaginable.

Unforgettable, even.

About the Author

Author Gary Corbin

Gary Corbin is an author and playwright in Camas, WA. Raised in a small town in New England, Gary has also lived in Louisiana (Geaux LSU Tigers!), Indiana (Go Hoosiers!), and Washington, DC.

Gary’s series feature page-turning plots, flawed but lovable protagonists, and bad guys you love to hate. His plays have enjoyed critical acclaim in regional and community theaters. Gary is a member of the Willamette Writers Group, The Writer’s Dojo, PDX Playwrights, and ALLi.

A homebrewer and coffee roaster, Gary loves to ski, cook, and watch his beloved Red Sox and Patriots. He hopes to someday train his dogs to obey. (Photo: Author website)

Connect with Gary
Website | Facebook | Bluesky