Finally, a book to get me reading entire books again ... This one was recommended by a friend (thanks MC!), so I picked it up in the Border's at Dulles Airport; I like to pick out one last new book there before leaving.

I described The Coffee Trader to a friend as in between The Birth of Venus and My Name Is Red -- that is, engaging historical mystery, not too trashy but not too dense. It's a surprisingly exciting mystery about commerce in mid-17th century Holland: a community of immigrant Portuguese Jews, some of whom are powerful merchants and some of whom are disgraced usurers; some smart and fiesty Dutch women trying to get ahead in a man's world; an assortment of thieves and lowlifes and roughnecks providing a colorful backdrop. It's a murky moral universe in which seeming villains do seemingly kind deeds and good people commit surprisingly actions. Every chapter has a gripping new development, and the plot twists so many times I couldn't begin to guess how it would end. (Only one of those twists was kind of gimmicky, I thought.)

This is not Liss' first novel -- A Conspiracy of Paper was published a few years ago and he is working on a sequel to it. Anyone read it?