Some non-fiction books read like fiction. Good fiction. The sort of book that keeps you reading hour after hour. Here are a few:

The Secret Rooms: a True Story of a Haunted Castle, a Plotting Duchess, and a Family Secret, by Catherine Bailey. A room was sealed in 1940 ... why? Sixty years later the author was one of the first historians allowed in ... and discovered a mystery. The 9th Duke had carefully collected and organized all the records covering generations of his family, but with a gap of three years during his own life time ... why? The search for the records and the answer takes the author on a journey across time and paperwork (!) as she discovers just what happened.

The story of art fraud, possibly the greatest scam of all time, is told in Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo. I read this after a recommendation came from Constant Reader and what a read it was! John Drewe was a charming con man. Much of his success with selling forgeries was due to the excellent provenance he could provide .... provenance he had created by sneaking paperwork into archives where he had been given access. Some of the forgeries he sold still hang in museums and art galleries today.

While this is a book about WWII, something I read about often, it's a departure from my usual books in that it takes place in the Pacific. Vanished: the Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II, by Wil S. Hinton. A B-24 Bomber was shot down in 1944, and little more was reported, the crew merely listed as MIA. What starts as a fun vacation for Hilton, becomes an obsession taking ten years to resolve. Sixty years after the plane went down, the families finally had answers to what happened. Thanks go to a friend I met 'way back in my college days for this recommendation. :-)

Reading Hermit With Dog