The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

US Special Forces and the CIA collide in Cold War Berlin

US Special Forces and the CIA collide in Cold War Berlin

Veterans of intelligence agencies and the special forces crowd the ranks of spy novelists. Some have rightfully been hailed as masters of the craft—John le Carré, for example. Or, more recently, David McCloskey. Others have written worthy and suspenseful novels that illuminate...

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NONFICTION

Popular Fiction

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

Today, Rwanda is one of the brightest lights in Africa. The economy is booming. Corruption is rare. Government delivers services. The streets of Kigali, the capital, are clean. It's even easy to open a business. Thirty years ago the country was in chaos, as this award-winning...

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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!

 

A Prisoner in Malta is a historical mystery novel.

A delightful historical mystery novel starring Christopher Marlowe

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes If you're looking for a swashbuckling adventure story, check out A Prisoner in Malta by Phillip DePoy. In this fast-moving historical mystery novel featuring Christopher Marlowe, the 19-year-old poet and playwright swashes buckles with the best of them. Naturally,...
Cover image of "The Parable of the Sower," a dystopian novel

A superb dystopian novel by Octavia E. Butler

Welcome to one of the most acclaimed dystopian novels of recent times. 15-year-old Lauren Olamina is the daughter of a Baptist minister and the eldest of his five children. Both Reverend Olamina and his second wife, Lauren's stepmother, are African-American, and both hold PhDs. Lauren's father...
Black Knight in Red Square foretells the collapse of the USSR.

The collapse of the USSR is underway in this detective novel

Why did the Soviet Union implode and the Berlin Wall crumble overnight? For many conservative Americans, the answer is Ronald Reagan. But level-headed analysts have debunked that thesis. In fact, the roots of the crisis that came to a head in the fall of the USSR lay deep in Soviet society. And...
Cover image of "The Redeemers," a novel filled with Southern-fried violence

Good ol’ boys and Southern-fried violence

Quinn Colson is a classic action hero. He was a sergeant in the Army Rangers, serving for 13 deployments over ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several years previously he returned home to Tibbehah County in northern Mississippi to pick up where he left off with his high-school girlfriend, now...
Cover image of "Forever Peace," a war novel about robot soldiers

A prescient look at the military of the future

Visions of future warfare abound with horror stories about robot soldiers. Ranks of Star Wars stormtroopers march through our eyes as we think the unthinkable of war conducted by proxy, with human operators located at great distance from the front lines like the men and women who pilot Reaper and...
Landfall presents a sympathetic portrait of George W. Bush.

A novelist’s sympathetic portrait of George W. Bush

George W. Bush served in the Oval Office from 2001 to 2009. His two terms in office encompassed 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the global financial collapse that set off the Great Recession—surely, the most consequential sequence of events in any eight years in...
Joseph Finder thrillers: Buried Secrets by Joseph Finder

Industrial espionage, spies, and high finance: the Joseph Finder thrillers

Boston-based thriller author Joseph Finder holds degrees in Russian studies from Yale and Harvard and taught for a time on the Harvard faculty. As of 2020, he has written 19 novels about industrial espionage and international intrigue. At this writing, I've read and reviewed all but four of the...
A Cold Red Sunrise

A terrific historical murder mystery set in the USSR

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Stuart Kaminsky won the Edgar for Best Novel for A Cold Red Sunrise, and it's easy to see why. The four books that precede it in his long-running series featuring Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov are all excellent. But he outdoes himself with this fascinating...
The Judge's List

John Grisham’s new legal thriller about a killer judge

Lacy Stolz of the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct first made her appearance five years ago in The Whistler. Then, she brought down a sitting judge and the vicious criminals he was in bed with. She almost died as a result. Now, Lacy is on the verge of leaving her job after twelve mostly...
Cover image of "A Kind of Freedom" by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, a powerful family drama.

A powerful family drama about living with Jim Crow

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton opens her debut novel with a poignant quote from Edward P. Jones' book of short stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children: "They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the wombs with what all their kind had...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

Weekly book reviews to match your taste!

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Mal Warwick

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…includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.

My latest
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…includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.

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