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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

The best spy novelists writing today

The best spy novelists writing today

The first espionage novels appeared early in the 19th century with the publication of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy in 1821 and The Bravo in 1831. A few other notable titles were published in the ensuing decades, and Sherlock Holmes got into the act around the turn...

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NONFICTION

Roger Ailes: the man who built Fox News and divided America

Roger Ailes: the man who built Fox News and divided America

As a teenager growing up in the 1950s in Lima, Ohio, (population 50,000 then), I learned that our local daily, The Lima News, had been purchased by a man named R. C. Hoiles. Hoiles lived in Orange County, California, and was a member of the John Birch Society. He owned a chain...

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Popular Fiction

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Shortly after the 19th century turned into the 20th, a medical sleuth named George Soper, whom we would today call an epidemiologist, identified a young Irish immigrant cook in New York City as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever. Her name was Mary...

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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 "Echo House," one of the best novels about politics

The five best novels about politics

Please focus on the headline. What you’ll see below is a list of the five best novels about politics—as distinct from political novels. The stories here cast light on the mechanics of the political process—insider baseball, if you will. By contrast, a political novel reflects the...
unconventional thriller: The Prophet by Michael Koryta

Looking for an unconventional thriller? Read this book

A review of The Prophet, by Michael Koryta. @@@@ (4 out of 5). A tale of two brothers whose lives are dominated by football and by the senseless murder of their sister 22 years ago. A homicide, all too reminiscent of their sister’s, shocks them both into reliving the event.

Cover image of "The Feather Detective,"

She may have saved your life

You've probably never heard her name before. But if you fly frequently she may have saved your life. Her name was Roxie Laybourne, and she was of all unlikely things the world’s first forensic ornithologist. In 1960, when Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crashed on takeoff from Logan International...
Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders

A charming cozy mystery set during the Blitz

Early in 1942, American soldiers and airmen began pouring into England in what Britons termed the Friendly Invasion. In a charming cozy mystery, Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders, Tessa Arlen dramatizes the impact of the Yank invasion on the tiny village of Little Buffenden. While bombs fall...
Cover image of "At Risk" by Dame Stella Rimington

Dame Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle series of top-notch espionage novels

Ex-spooks with a modicum of writing ability sometimes turn to writing spy thrillers once they've left the world of espionage. Rarely, though, do we see fictional treatments of the game come from anyone who retired at the very top of the game. Dame Stella Rimington is one of what must be only a...
Cover image of "Lessons Learned," a hopeful dystopian novel

Recovering from the Apocalypse

When COVID first struck with lethal fury a few years ago, the pessimists among us conjured up visions of a landscape devoid of human life. Bodies in the streets and on the roads. Cities everywhere depopulated. Farmlands lying fallow for lack of attention. Government services failing to...
The Plot

A plot within a plot within a plot

Writing in the Washington Post (May 16, 2021), Maureen Corrigan says The Plot is "the best thriller of the year (so far)." And according to the book jacket, Stephen King calls it "insanely readable." I wonder why. True, the novel is unusually well written. The plot is clever, the story well-paced...
Cover image of "The Fear Index," a novel about hedge funds

A taut thriller about the world of multibillion-dollar hedge funds

A review of The Fear Index, by Robert Harris. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Set in Geneva, this taut thriller takes the reader into the world of a brilliant American scientist, Dr. Alexander Hoffman, who has developed mathetical formulas that make billions in profits for his hedge fund.

How Fascism Works is about the "politics of us and them."

Donald Trump’s playbook revealed in a penetrating new book, “How Fascism Works”

Let's get real. What the news media and the pundits call populism these days is actually something more familiar to European historians. It's fascism. And it's high time for Americans to recognize that. Of course, this doesn't mean that the politics of the Trump Administration represent full-blown...
Cover image of "The Oppermanns," an early anti-Nazi novel

A German anti-Nazi novel published in 1933

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes From a distance of ninety years, it's difficult for many Americans to understand how Adolf Hitler could have come to power in such a highly advanced and cultured country as Germany. And at the same time, many of us wonder why, with Hitler's true intentions so...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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