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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

Were British double agents the key to the Normandy invasion?

Were British double agents the key to the Normandy invasion?

Americans' views of the Second World War have been dominated by films, books, and television specials about the role that U.S. troops played in the fighting. Even today, more than three-quarters of a century after the war ended, we tend to believe that it was our ingenuity and...

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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!

 

Cover image of "The Vig," the first of the Dismas Hardy series

A great start to John Lescroart’s Dismas Hardy series

Dismas Hardy's resumé is a little difficult to understand: former Marine (combat in Vietnam), former San Francisco cop, former Assistant DA, now one-quarter owner of the Shamrock and full-time bartender there. The explanation is simple, though. The events that induced him to leave a promising...
Losing the News by Alex S. Jones

Alex S. Jones laments the passing newspaper era

The subtitle of this impassioned essay—The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy—tells half the story, one that's familiar to any alert reader of today's major newspapers. The other half of the story, equally familiar, is about how the Internet is undermining the newspaper industry and, in the...
Cover image of "Extraordinary Powers," a standout among espionage thrillers

A standout among espionage thrillers from Joseph Finder

Ben Ellison is a Boston patent lawyer who is a former CIA agent who had lost his first wife to an explosion engineered by the KGB. He possesses an eidetic memory and, after an unusually powerful MRI, the ability to read minds -- and, yes, through his second wife, he is now the son-in-law of the...
Cover image of "The Buck Stops Here," a book about decisions that changed history

Assessing the most fateful Presidential decisions

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes When we study American history in high school or college, we learn that Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from the French and James Polk launched the Mexican-American War. But what we don't often learn about are the context in which Presidents...
Cover image of "Hons and Rebels,"

A memoir by one of the greatest wits of the 20th century

Jessica Mitford was one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, and perhaps of any century. Her books, most famously The American Way of Death, eviscerated the American funeral industry, our prison system, and obstetrical care in the United States. But to those in Britain, where she was born in...

A Nazi-hunter in post-war Venice in a suspenseful novel of intrigue

World War II has ended, and Venice is unscathed -- or so it would seem. However, when Nazi-hunter Adam Miller lands there to visit his mother after his release from the Army, he finds that it reverberates with all the residual conflicts and tensions of the time. Sheltered at first among his...
Spies in Palestine is about a female Jewish spy in World War I.

The female Jewish spy who helped pave the way to the State of Israel

In the early history of the Israeli state, the name Aaron Aaronsohn stands out. In some ways, the agronomist who discovered an ancient strain of wheat that could be grown in the desert is as significant a figure as Chaim Weizmann and Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Large numbers of Jewish colonists...
Cover image of "Now May You Weep," a novel by one of the leading English mystery writers

One of my favorite English mystery writers is  . . . a Texan?

Go figure: one of my favorite English mystery writers is  . . . a Texan? Yes, it's true. The biographical blurb in the back of Deborah Crombie's English mystery novels insist that she was born and lives in Texas. As an American myself, I can't claim to be the final authority on the...
Cover image of "The Tempest," a novel

Shakespeare’s magic rendered into advanced alien technology

At what point does hard science fiction cross the line into fantasy? Read the work of any of the field's most revered practitioners—Arthur C. Clarke is the most prominent among them—and you'll see that any story which ventures into the far reaches of advanced alien technology becomes...
Sleep Well, My Lady

The truth lies undercover in this Ghana murder mystery

Ghana's most celebrated women's fashion designer has been murdered in her bed, and the police investigation has, as is so often the case, gone awry. Lacking even a shred of evidence, they've arrested and imprisoned without trial Lady Araba's driver and prevented the police lab from analyzing DNA...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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

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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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