When the Japanese began bombing the Philippines on December 8, 1941, Claire Phillips, an American woman living in Manila, tried to ignore it as much as possible.

She was a popular singer at the Alcazar Club, and she had recently become engaged to John (Phil) Phillips, a radio man with Headquarters Company, 31st Infantry. This was the life she had dreamed of.

As much as Claire tried to ignore the war, the reality caught up with her. Overnight, Manila had become a dangerous city. When Phil told her Headquarters Company was pulling out, heading for a defensive position on the Bataan peninsula, he insisted that she and her young daughter, Dian, follow them. They would be safer there, under the protection of the U.S. Army.

Claire packed her car with all the supplies it could hold, invited her household servant Lolita to join them, and fled the city. They settled in the small town of Pilar, about halfway down the Bataan peninsula. There, Claire set up a canteen for soldiers. Intensified enemy bombing at the end of December forced Claire, Dian, and Lolita to move north to Hermosa.

Enemy troops occupied Manila on January 2, 1942. When the battle for Bataan began several days later, Claire, Dian, and Lolita relocated again, this time to the hills above Dinalupihan.

With this battle in full swing, Phil no longer had time to look after Claire and Dian, so he arranged for them to live under the protection of a local family. But as January wore on, Claire grew uneasy living in a strange place among people she did not know well. She decided to leave the relative safety of this enclave and travel south to Mariveles, through territory now dotted with enemy soldiers, hoping to find Phil and the U.S. Army.

To find out what happened to Claire, read more in Angels of the Underground.

I read over 60 books in 2015. It was easy to identify my top favorites; still, there were many more I liked and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend.

Mysteries hold a certain fascination for me, maybe because like historians, detectives have to sort through information to decide what holds up, to see how it all fits together. I am a devoted fan of several mystery series, both historical and contemporary.

For that noir vibe, nothing beats Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series. Originally a policeman in Berlin in the 1930s, Gunther has been coerced into working for the Nazis. In The Lady from Zagreb, Joseph Goebbels tasks Gunther with convincing the beautiful actress Dalia Dresner to star in a certain film. The job leads Gunther to Yugoslavia, where he confronts a web of atrocities.

In Dreaming Spies, Laurie King situates her main characters, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, in Japan in the mid-1920s in a tale of international blackmail. This series had begun to sag, but this is a terrific installment.

Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series has been stellar from the start. Maisie is a private detective living in England in the interwar period. Memories of the Great War loom large, and now, as evidenced in A Dangerous Place, new horrors are on the horizon. Traveling through Gibraltar in 1937, Maisie stumbles on a murder that has international consequences.

Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley’s personal past is haunting him less. In Elizabeth George’s A Banquet of Consequences, he and his partner Barbara Havers turn their attention to a poisoning that leads them to the dysfunctional Goldacre family. Lynley is determined not only to solve the mystery, but to help Havers salvage her professional reputation.

Cormoran Strike is one of the most intriguing fictional detectives to grace a contemporary mystery series. J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith, has crafted another fine entry. Career of Evil starts with a severed leg delivered to Strike’s office, addressed to his assistant, Robin. The resolution of this case goes hand in hand with a recalibration of Strike’s relationship with Robin.

Ben Winters concluded his innovative Last Policeman trilogy with World of Trouble. An asteroid is still headed toward Earth and will still obliterate life on the planet. Henry Palace is determined to solve one final mystery: what happened to his sister Nico?

The final book in 2015’s Top Ten is:

I don’t include much nonfiction in my leisure reading because I read so much of it for work. At libraries and book stores, I browse through the latest nonfiction releases to see what kinds of history topics attract editors and publishers. I saw Kurtz’s book at the library, leafed through it, and couldn’t put it down.

Kurtz’s grandparents embarked on a European vacation in 1938, the year before the Second World War broke out. His grandfather, David, had a new movie camera with him. One of their stops was in David’s hometown in Poland, where he shot three minutes of film.

Seventy years later, Glenn Kurtz found the reel and became mesmerized by the images it captured. Realizing his grandfather had documented life in a predominantly Jewish town right before the Holocaust, Kurtz set out to discover what happened to the people in the home movie. The resulting story is a haunting, personal account of the devastation of war and genocide.

Coming in at no. 9 is:

In 1915, with the world in the grip of a global war, the Ottoman Empire began the forced relocation of Armenians from what is now Turkish territory. That deportation devolved into genocide, resulting in the deaths of one million Armenians.

Ohanesian draws from her own family history to personalize this brutal event. Told in two time frames, the story centers on Lucine and Kemal who grow up together in the early 20th century, one Armenian, one a Turk. As their childhood friendship blossoms into romance, ethnic hostilities divide them. Decades later, a Turkish man named Orhan tries to figure out why his grandfather left the family home to an Armenian woman.

This is an utterly compelling novel, beautifully written. Once you pick it up, it’s almost impossible to put down until you’ve reached the end.

Number 8 on my list is:

Private investigator V.I. Warshawski once again gets tangled up in the long reach of corrupt Illinois politicians. An old high school boyfriend, Frank Guzzo, asks her to look into the decades-old murder of his younger sister, Annie. Their mother, Stella, had been convicted of the crime, and now that she’s been released from prison, Stella is seeking exoneration.

Paretsky is a fabulous storyteller, and V.I. is one of the top fictional detectives ever. Paretsky has managed to keep the series fresh by weaving past and present through the stories, showing how actions and choices reverberate through generations.

One of the reasons I like this series so much is because of the main character. V.I. is smart and tough, plus she has a strong sense of justice and is deeply (but not foolishly) compassionate. She has close and sometimes quirky friends and family members, a satisfying love life, and loyal canine companions.

V.I. has also aged. Paretsky hasn’t shied away from dealing with that. In Brush Back, V.I. is starting to confront her physical limitations–there are only so many times a middle-aged woman can get punched, kicked, shot, and buried alive. She may have to start re-thinking how she handles cases.

The other reason this series is so strong is its sense of place. Chicago and V.I. are inseparable, each an indelible character. You can’t help wondering what will happen to them next.