The Latest

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shiya Ribowsky walked to work. It was a beautiful day, and he was in no hurry. As director of identifications at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), he knew death keeps its own schedule. Then the first plane struck...

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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

The Lincoln Lawyer takes AI to court

The Lincoln Lawyer takes AI to court

As I write, more than 20 lawsuits have been filed against the company OpenAI over the alleged misbehavior of its chatbot, ChatGPT. (I could find none against Anthropic's Claude.) Doubtless, more will surface as time goes on, especially in the face of fast-growing reports that...

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NONFICTION

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shiya Ribowsky walked to work. It was a beautiful day, and he was in no hurry. As director of identifications at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), he knew death keeps its own schedule. Then the first plane struck...

read more

Popular Fiction

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

The legendary English humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), known to readers as P. G., wrote about 100 books in a career that spanned much of the 20th century. His output included 71 novels, 24 collections of short stories, 42 plays, three memoirs, and a lot...

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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.

Check out our rotating random selection here, culled from throughout this site.

Happy reading!

 

Retrograde portrays what life on Mars would really be like.

What life on Mars would really be like

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes If you want to understand what life on Mars would really be like, New Zealander-turned-Australian Peter Cawdron's excellent novel, Retrograde, is the place to start. Cawdron imagines an international 120-person scientific colony established there half a century or...
A City of Broken Glass is the fourth novel in Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel series.

Rebecca Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel series spans the history of Nazi Germany

The first four novels in Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel series span the history of Nazi Germany from 1931 to 1938: In the first book, set in 1931 during the tense time before Hitler seized the Chancellery, we meet Hannah, then working as a crime reporter for a leading Berlin newspaper. In the...
John Grishams latest: The Litigators

Get this: John Grisham’s latest novel is funny

A review of The Litigators, by John Grisham. @@@@ (4 out of 5). If you’re a John Griisham fan, as I am, you’ll probably be surprised at how many chuckles and guffaws his latest novel forces out of you. The Litigators, on one level a legal procedural like so many other Grisham works, is also a comedy. Even the title is a joke.

Cover image of "Downbelow Station,"

In this interstellar war, the combatants are all human

Pick up any one of those sci-fi epics with a lurid cover that promises a story of combat in space. What do you see? Probably, humans battling evil aliens resembling lizards or spiders—or something undefinable. You can be sure there'll be lots of battles, with heroic space jockeys stressed to the...
Cover image of one book in The Night Soldiers series by Alan Furst

The evocative Night Soldiers series from Alan Furst

Alan Furst has written fifteen novels to date in his Night Soldiers series, which he began writing late in the 1980s when he was nearly 50 years of age. While attending general studies courses at Columbia University, he became acquainted with Margaret Mead, for whom he later worked. Before...
Cover image of "Lamentation,"

Religious conflicts threaten the stability of Henry VIII’s reign

Henry VIII gets a lot of attention from historians, biographers, and novelists alike, but not for the wisdom of his policies as king. In fact, you might say the only good thing he did for his people was to father the child who became Queen Elizabeth I. In her four decades on the throne, Elizabeth...
Cover image of "The Seersucker Whipsaw," by Ross Thomas

A terrific novel for political junkies about Africa by Ross Thomas

Clint Shartelle is a honey-tongued Southerner who wears impeccable three-piece suits and drinks like a fish. (Do fish actually drink? Whatever.) Shartelle claims to be one sixty-fourth Native American, one-twelfth African-American, and the country's best political campaign manager. Apparently, he...
Cover image of "War," a Sebastian Junger book

War in Afghanistan, up-front and brutal, from Sebastian Junger

So, here you are. You're Sebastian Junger and you want to write a book about war. You're a reporter who's long since proven he has the guts and the physical stamina to outlast most people, and now you've decided to tell the story of the war in Afghanistan -- the story of all wars, really --...
Cover image of "The Leopard" by Jo Nesbo, one of the Harry Hole thrillers

The outstanding Harry Hole thrillers from Jo Nesbø

Over the past twenty years, the Norwegian novelist and musician Jo Nesbø has been writing a series of crime thrillers featuring homicide detective Inspector Harry Hole of the Oslo police. More than 30 million copies of these novels have been sold worldwide, translated into over 40 languages....
Nuking the Moon is about the CIA and Pentagon's comic misadventures.

Cockamamie schemes of the CIA and the Pentagon

Imagine you've just wandered into the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. You run into the museum's historian in the hallway, and for some reason he opens up to you. In the coffee shop downstairs, he starts telling you about all the crazy stuff that never made it off the drawing board at...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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