Dorothy Martin, an American widow living in England, is on her way to lunch with Alan Nesbitt – chief constable, and her own chief beau – when she notices movement in the abandoned town hall and can’t resist a snoop. But what she, and cleaning lady Ada Finch, find in there is cause for serious alarm: a dead body. And, what’s worse, when Dorothy leaves the building some time later, she notices the corpse’s arms have been moved and its eyes closed . . .

Every week on the public radio show On the Media, the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day’s events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls—and what so many of us can acknowledge having—“trouble with reality.” Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was—there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point. The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not. And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it. Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity.

Hailed as "toweringly important" (Baltimore Sun), "a work of scrupulous and significant reportage" (E. L. Doctorow), and "an unforgettable historical drama" (Chicago Sun-Times), Big Trouble brings to life the astonishing case that ultimately engaged President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the politics and passions of an entire nation at century's turn. After Idaho's former governor is blown up by a bomb at his garden gate at Christmastime 1905, America's most celebrated detective, Pinkerton James McParland, takes over the investigation. His daringly executed plan to kidnap the radical union leader "Big Bill" Haywood from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho sets the stage for a memorable courtroom confrontation between the flamboyant prosecutor, progressive senator William Borah, and the young defender of the dispossessed, Clarence Darrow. Big Trouble captures the tumultuous first decade of the twentieth century, when capital and labor, particularly in the raw, acquisitive West, were pitted against each other in something close to class war. Lukas paints a vivid portrait of a time and place in which actress Ethel Barrymore, baseball phenom Walter Johnson, and editor William Allen White jostled with railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, socialist Eugene V. Debs, gunslinger Charlie Siringo, and Operative 21, the intrepid Pinkerton agent who infiltrated Darrow's defense team. This is a grand narrative of the United States as it charged, full of hope and trepidation, into the twentieth century.

For Dorothy Martin, a widowed American who’s moved to the England she so loves, the Christmas service is painful enough. It is her first holiday without Frank. And stumbling over the body of Canon Billings does nothing to improve her mood. Of course, she does get to meet Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, and a good mystery on a chilly English night does have some appeal . . .

Spending a peaceful vacation on the charming Scottish island of Iona, Dorothy Martin’s enjoyment is marred only by her fellow travelling companions, a bickering American church tour. When one of the group suffers a fatal fall from a cliff, everyone believes it to be an accident. Everyone except Dorothy, that is. With the police about to close the case, Dorothy feels bound to investigate. It’s a decision she may regret.

When Dorothy Martin gets a call from her friend Ada Finch, whose gardener son has been arrested for the attempted theft of an antique dolls’ tea set from the Miniatures Museum at the imposing Brocklesby Hall, she doesn’t hesitate to offer her services to clear his name. But when theft leads to murder, Dorothy discovers there are big secrets hidden in the rooms filled with miniatures.