The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

Four robots wake up in a restaurant, and they’re in charge

Four robots wake up in a restaurant, and they’re in charge

California's long War of Independence has ended. It's 2064. All of a sudden the new country's many sentient robots, most of them veterans, face an uncertain future. The president has signed legislation declaring them HEEI (pronounced HE-eye), or Human Equivalent Embodied...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

How the women’s revolution changed the CIA

How the women’s revolution changed the CIA

Few agencies of the US Government resisted women's liberation and the civil rights movement as long or as fiercely as the CIA. Born in the macho exploits of the OSS in World War II, an old boys' network continued to direct the country's premier spy service well into the 1980s....

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Popular Fiction

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 "Real Tigers" by Mick Herron, a novel about British spooks

Slough House spooks are on the loose again

They're all spooks. But Marcus is a gambling addict. Shirley's a cokehead ("It was a weekend thing with her, strictly Thursday to Tuesday"). Catherine is a recovering alcoholic, Louisa a sex addict, Roddy a hacker with a toxic personality. And River screwed up a large-scale training mission so...
The Bad Muslim Discount

A Muslim odyssey, from Karachi and Baghdad to San Francisco

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s, I learned about culture shock. First, working with Quechua-speaking indigenous people in Ecuador, whose lives were unfathomable to me. And again when I returned to the states after nearly four years abroad, paralyzed by the unimaginable variety of choices...
Cover image of "Dressed for Death," a novel about corruption in Venice

Donna Leon writes again about corruption in Venice

In 1992, at the age of 50, a professor of English literature named Donna Leon published Death at La Fenice. The novel won a major award and set her off on writing a series of sequels, now numbering 25. Set in Venice, where Leon has been living for the past 25 years, these skillful police...
Cover image of "Ancillary Justice," a peculiar book.

Why did this peculiar book win both the Nebula and Hugo Awards?

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was the first novel ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. I'm trying to figure out why. Let's see if we can suss out what's going on in the story. For starters, every character is referred to as "she" or "her" regardless of whether they...
Cover image of "North Korea Confidential," a book about North Korea

North Korea is not (quite) the country you thought it was

Practically everything you know about North Korea is wrong. That, at least, is the inescapable conclusion to take from reading Daniel Tudor and James Pearson's new book, North Korea Confidential. I exaggerate, of course. North Korea is, without question, one of the poorest countries in the...
In Make Russia Great Again, Christopher Buckley satirizes Donald Trump.

Satirizing Donald Trump is a tall order

Christopher Buckley is far and away the most accomplished political satirist writing today in America. In novels such as Thank You for Smoking and They Eat Puppies, Don't They?, he has skewered the nation's political establishment six ways from Sunday. Now, for the first time in nearly a decade,...
Cover image of "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes" by Brad Ricca, a book about a great female detective

The great female detective who captivated WWI America

As a child, she was known as Mary Grace Winterton, one of three daughters of a wealthy New York family. After gaining a law degree from NYU and being admitted to the bar in 1904, she set up the People's Law Firm to offer affordable legal services to low-income New Yorkers, especially immigrants....
Shell Game is a V. I. Warshawski thriller.

V. I. Warshawski uncovers fraud in high places once again

Of all America's great cities, Chicago stands out as the prime example of corruption. (Admittedly, Los Angeles and New Orleans are in the running as well.) And if Chicago's corruption has its bard, she is Sara Paretsky, author of the long-running series of Chicago-based detective novels. Nearly 40...
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...
Cover image of "Murder in the Sentier," a novel about a brilliant French detective

1970s radicals, Paris in the 1990s, and a brilliant French detective

It's puzzling to me why an American author living in the United States would choose to write one novel after another in a long-running series of detective novels set in a foreign land. Cara Black's series about the brilliant French detective Aimee Leduc is set in Paris. But she is by no means the...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Love mysteries and thrillers? Historical fiction fan? Prefer to read nonfiction? Or, like me, you just love reading? Take your pick of my three weekly newsletters. Just click the Yes! button, and you’re on your way.

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Mal Warwick

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