THE BLOODY BLACK FLAG: A SPIDER JOHN MYSTERY Steve Goble, Seventh Street Books, 2017, $15.95, pb, 240 pp. 9781633883598 Spider John Rush was a married carpenter, but forced by circumstance into piracy. Now he and his friend Ezra must once again join a pirate crew, to avoid danger ashore….

BENEATH THE DARKEST SKY Jason Overstreet, Kensington Publishing Corporation, 2018, $26.00, hb, 302 pp. 9781496701787 American Foreign Service worker and former FBI agent Prescott Sweet finds the enticement of working in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the mid-1930s too tantalizing to resist. The fact that he is African American in an…