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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A Tang Dynasty judge solves a string of baffling murders

A Tang Dynasty judge solves a string of baffling murders

For readers in the USA or Europe, it can be a challenge to understand law enforcement policies and procedures in countries grounded in non-Western values and assumptions. In China, for example. The Inspector Chen novels of the Chinese expatriate author Qiu Xiaolong show just...

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NONFICTION

A soldier helped build America’s Empire. Then he spoke out.

A soldier helped build America’s Empire. Then he spoke out.

Few know his name today. But over a 34-year military career, Marine officer Smedley Butler (1881-1940) was for long America's most famous soldier. He fought in the Philippine–American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and all of the USA's imperial...

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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!

 

Cover image of "Overboard,"

V. I. Warshawski finds Chicago cops running wild

The HBO drama We Own This City has just concluded online as I write this review. The show is a deeply-researched portrayal of a federal investigation into a special unit in the Baltimore Police Department called the Gun Trace Task Force. The unit served for years as a front for blatant criminal...
Cover image of "Little Green Men," a novel about where UFOs come from

Wonder where UFOs come from?

A review of Little Green Men, by Christopher Buckley. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Not only does Buckley make me chuckle and wheeze with immoderate glee, but he also solves the mystery of the UFOs!

Cover image of "Nexus" by Ramez Naam, a novel about the post-human future

The post-human future explored in an outstanding SF novel

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Nearly sixty years ago, a psychologist and computer scientist named J. C. R. Licklider published a landmark paper under the title "Man-Computer Symbiosis." He is best known today as the Pentagon official who funded the predecessor to the Internet, the ARPANET. But...
Cover image of "Six Wakes" by Mur Lafferty, a sci-fi mystery.

A locked-room sci-fi mystery on an interstellar spaceship

If you're an Agatha Christie fan and can at least tolerate science fiction, you might enjoy Mur Lafferty's Nebula-Award nominee Six Wakes. I didn't. This sci-fi mystery illustrates the worst of both genres. Estimated reading time: 4 minutes As a mystery story, Six Wakes is as contrived as the...
Before Mars is a psychological thriller in a science fiction setting.

A psychological thriller in a science fiction setting

Forty years ago, the massive starship Atlas left Earth for a distant planet in search of God. The ship carried ten thousand of humanity's most brilliant scientific minds, led by a charismatic woman called the Pathfinder. The billions left behind on Earth are struggling with overpopulation, rising...
Cover image of "Leaving Everything Most Loved" by Jacqueline Winspear, a novel involving English class dynamics

Maisie Dobbs confronts class dynamics in Depression-era England

London, July 1933: The Great Depression is underway in full force. Adolf Hitler has seized power in Germany, and Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists is striking fear into the hearts of the Establishment. But Maisie Dobbs has problems of her own. Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Now 36,...
Image of wormhole used in time travel in science fiction

The 10 best time travel novels

Time travel is one of the most familiar tropes in science fiction. Many scholars trace the idea to Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol (1843) and Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). (Others differ, finding antecedents as early as 1733 in...
The Relentless Moon is the third book in the Lady Astronaut series.

The third Lady Astronaut novel doesn’t live up to the promise of the first two

Now, don't get me wrong. The Relentless Moon is a successful science fiction novel. Its depiction of the alternate universe of 1960s America is flawless. The world might have gone that way, and the technology is realistic. The characters act in entirely human ways, and they fully reflect the...
Cover image of "A Student of History," a mystery without suspense

A historical mystery without suspense

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, once famously defined a novel in which "something happens." He even later wrote a novel with that title. (It wasn't very good.) So, it's reasonable for a reader to expect upon digging into a book-length story that, in fact,...
Cover image of "Bandwidth,"

When access to “the feed” becomes as essential as food and water

Bandwidth rules. A Silicon Valley-based consortium of tech companies called Commonwealth monopolizes "the feed" in the world's most prosperous countries. And the feed provides a window into a personalized reality for every individual plugged into it. Which, in this world wracked by soaring...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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