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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A brilliant addition to a long-running thriller series

A brilliant addition to a long-running thriller series

Leonard Summers; his wife, Martha; and son, Bernard, are moving into a remote cabin in Minnesota. But his name isn't Leonard Summers. It's Leonid Sokolov. And "he was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency," Lucas Davenport explains to fellow US Marshal...

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NONFICTION

How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

From its early days following World War I, what Hitler later renamed the Nazi Party had a powerful political sponsor behind the scenes: the Thule Society. Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw notes that the organization's "membership list ... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi...

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Popular Fiction

She was a pioneering astronomer. In the 18th century.

She was a pioneering astronomer. In the 18th century.

Women did not begin to gain any measure of equality with men until sometime in the 20th century. So it is always inspiring to read about women whose accomplishments were so outstanding that even under the most egregious pressure of misogyny they made their mark on history. One...

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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!

 

The Quiet Americans

How the CIA helped set the course for a half-century of US policy

For most readers with a passing interest in espionage, the operations of the CIA beginning in the 1950s are reasonably familiar. But that's not the case of the Agency's work in the years immediately following World War II. Scott Anderson corrects that gap in The Quiet Americans, an illuminating...
Cover image of "Collusion" by Luke Harding, a book about the collusion exposed in the 2016 Trump campaign

Collusion exposed, but is there more? Is Donald Trump a Russian agent?

If the question in the above headline strikes you as over the top, you might feel differently after reading the Steele Dossier and Collusion. In the book, Guardian reporter Luke Harding analyzes and comments on the dossier, adding his own, independent findings. Even if you follow the...
The Case of the Love Commandos is solved by India's #1 private detective.

India’s #1 private detective and the Love Commandos

So, here we go again. The vainglorious Vishwas Puri, who styles himself India's #1 private detective, is off and running on another case with his motley team of assistants . . . and his mother. On three cases, actually, which is only par for the course for the corpulent, food-fancying sleuth. For...
Cover image of "The Plague of Doves," a novel about crime on an Indian reservation

Tragedy, on and off the reservation

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Just try to imagine a novel that encompasses all these elements: a lynching on an Indian reservation, a young woman's lesbian awakening, a man's kidnapping of his wife, a multiple murder, a collection of rare postage stamps, a dim-witted Catholic priest, a rape, a...
Cover image of "Need to Know," an account of the rise of American intelligence

The rise of American intelligence in World War II

World War II began for the United States with a catastrophic intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor. Two decades earlier, during the First World War, the US military had begun building capacity in signals and communications intelligence. But little was left in place by 1941. Yet, just four years...
Cover image of "Career of Evil," one of J. K. Rowling's excellent adult novels

J. K. Rowling proves she can write excellent adult novels

In Career of Evil, the third installment in J. K. Rowling's pseudonymous series about the detective with the unlikely name of Cormoran Strike, we learn a great deal more of Cormoran's backstory and that of his intrepid sidekick, Robin Ellacott. The one-legged detective, formerly a military police...
Cover image of "The Stonecutter," a Scandinavian thriller

Another complex Scandinavian thriller

Camilla Läckberg is Sweden's best-selling native author, and it's not difficult to understand why. The series of detective novels she has set in the small seaside town of Fjällbacka features complex plots and three-dimensional characters -- lots of them. The Stonecutter, the third in Läckberg's...
Ironclads depicts a future of endless war.

In a clever novella, a future of endless war

Rule out climate change or catastrophic events like a supervolcano eruption or a meteor collision. Then try to imagine a dystopian future caused entirely by human agency, taking current trends to their logical conclusion. Including radical change in the climate, of course. You might then end up...

A brilliant novel of the French Resistance

Alan Furst homes in on the French Resistance in Red Gold, the fifth of the 13 novels in his "Night Soldiers" series that have been appearing regularly since 1988. His mastery of the moods and the political environment in Europe before and during the Second World War is unexcelled, and the flawed,...
published every year: Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson

Would you believe how many books are published every year in the U.S.?

These numbers may surprise you. According to UNESCO, which compiles the total number of books published in every country, there was a total of 2.2 million books issued in the most recent year available. That year was 2011 or 2012 for the top producers, much earlier for small nations, in many cases...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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