Book review: Second Sleep and Black Sun

This week, Catherine Raynes reviews two new exciting books for you to read. 














Second Sleep - Robert Harris
From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy–a chilling and dark new thriller unlike anything Robert Harris has done before.
1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artefacts–coins, fragments of glass, human bones–which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to his death?
Fairfax becomes determined to discover the truth. Over the course of the next six days, everything he believes–about himself, his faith, and the history of his world–will be tested to destruction.
Black Sun - Owen Mathews
It is the dawn of the 1960s. In order to investigate the gruesome death of a brilliant young physicist, KGB officer Major Alexander Vasin must leave Moscow for Arzamas-16, a top-secret research city that does not appear on any map.
There he comes up against the brightest, most cutthroat brain trust in Russia who, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev himself, are building a nuclear weapon with 3,800 times the destructive potential of the Hiroshima bomb. RDS-220 is a project of such vital national importance that, unlike everyone else in the Soviet Union, the scientists of Arzamas-16 are free to think and act, live and love as they wish…as long as they complete the project and prove to their capitalist enemies that the USSR now commands the heights of nuclear supremacy.
With intricately plotted machinations, secrets and surveillance, corrupt politicos and puppet masters in the Politburo, and one devastating weapon, Owen Matthews has crafted a timely, terrific, and fast-paced thriller set at the height–and in the heart–of Soviet power.LISTEN TO AUDIO ABOVE