The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

This eco-thriller will keep you up at night

This eco-thriller will keep you up at night

If you're the sort of person who worries a lot, as I am, there's no end of fodder today for your troubled brain. Climate change. The threat of nuclear war. A new pandemic. The end of democracy. And so many other grim possibilities. But, chances are, you're not worried about...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

An assassin stalks Los Angeles in this Alex Delaware thriller

An assassin stalks Los Angeles in this Alex Delaware thriller

Someone has dumped the body of a young woman outside an acute-care hospital in west Los Angeles. There's nothing on the corpse to identify the woman. But her fingerprints are on file from a background check where she worked. She's "Marissa Adrianne French, twenty-five years...

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NONFICTION

Popular Fiction

Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

No one is still alive with any adult memory of World War I, which ended a century ago. So when we think of the events that have shaped the world we live in today it's likely World War II looms large. But its antecedent three decades earlier may have had greater long-term...

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Explore My “BEST OF the category” selections

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE BOOK?

When people ask me that question, I never know what to say. In a lifetime of reading, I’ve read many thousands of books. And I’ve reviewed well over 2,000 of them on this site. Picking just one as a “favorite,” or even a handful of them, makes no sense to me.

The problem is, I read for many different reasons. Perhaps you do, too. And I read many different sorts of books. Mysteries and thrillers. Popular fiction, especially historical fiction. Science fiction.

And nonfiction, history in particular. You’ll find hundreds of reviews in every one of those categories on this site.

Look to the right for a rotating random selection culled from throughout this site.

Happy reading!

 

Cover image of "Bellwether," a satirical sci-fi novel

From Connie Willis satire that doesn’t make me laugh

I'm a big fan of satire. For instance, I love Christopher Buckley's books. Some of them make me laugh almost nonstop. But there's nothing worse than a satirical tale that. Just. Isn't. Funny. Unfortunately, that's what I found in Bellwether by Connie Willis. Apparently, Willis wrote this satirical...
Cover image of "Sneaky People," a great example of black humor

Revisiting black humor (not Black humor)

Back in the 1960s, when I began reading in earnest beyond the boundaries of textbooks and science fiction, novels characterized by critics as "black humor" were popular, and I ate them up. (That's black as in dark or cynical, gallows humor, not African-American.) This was the heyday of Joseph...
Cover image of "Heartstone,"

Two troubling legal cases in Henry VIII’s England

London reels from increasingly frantic reports that the French are assembling a massive invasion fleet across the Channel. Officers roam the streets in search of young men to press into service for the army. And, to pay for the impending war, the king has debased the currency again, causing havoc...
Cover image of "The Matchmaker," a spy thriller

The best mysteries and thrillers of 2022

To be clear, what follows is not a list of the best mysteries and thrillers published during the past year. Instead, I’ve decided not to copy those reviewers who imply they've read the many thousands of mysteries and thrillers published in any given year. Nobody, and no team of...
Cover image of "Ah, Treachery!," the final Ross Thomas novel.

Colorful characters and lots of surprises in the final Ross Thomas novel

In the final Ross Thomas novel, the master was at his best. The late Ross Thomas wrote some of America's most fondly remembered novels about politics, espionage, and crime, creating some of the most colorful characters in the genre. One measure of the esteem in which Thomas was held by his peers...
Déjà Vu

A weird science fiction novel that will keep you guessing

This book starts out spooky. Then it gets really weird. If you're up for that, join Peter Cawdron for a wild ride through space and time in another original First Contact adventure. Déjà Vu might be characterized as Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke meet Groundhog Day. It's one of seventeen...
Photo of Paul Vidich, who writes outstanding spy novels

A newcomer who writes superb spy novels

Even if you're a fan of espionage fiction, you may not yet be familiar with the name Paul Vidich. You should be. Vidich writes great spy novels in the grand tradition of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré. His historical espionage tales rank with those of his better-known...
A Death of No Importance

A mine disaster, and a murder, in this Gilded Age mystery

On Nov. 13, 1909, the collapse of the Cherry Mine in Cherry, Illinois, killed 259 boys and men. Mariah Fredericks builds her suspenseful mystery tale, A Death of No Importance, around a fictionalized version of this late-Gilded Age disaster. The novel is both social history and a murder story....
Cover image of "Sell Us the Rope,"

When Stalin was a young revolutionary

How do you humanize a monster? Perhaps if you dig deeply into his early years, when he was a young revolutionary. As a thug, a bank robber, a killer, to be sure. But decades before he became the all-powerful mass murderer who starved millions of Ukrainians to death, sent millions more to the gulag...
Cover image of "IQ," a novel about a crimesolver

Sherlock in the hood: inner-city crimesolver

Most readers of detective fiction are well educated and live in comfortable circumstances. So it's not surprising that most novels about people solving crimes involve well-educated investigators who live in at least middle-class homes. There are many exceptions, of course. George Pelecanos...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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