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!

 

Cover image of "Sneaky People," a great example of black humor

Revisiting black humor (not Black humor)

Back in the 1960s, when I began reading in earnest beyond the boundaries of textbooks and science fiction, novels characterized by critics as "black humor" were popular, and I ate them up. (That's black as in dark or cynical, gallows humor, not African-American.) This was the heyday of Joseph...
Cover image of "The Warsaw Uprising,"

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944

No country in the world suffered greater devastation in World War II than Poland, not even the Soviet Union, where as many as twenty-seven million people died. Poland's six million dead represented an even higher proportion of the pre-war population—about one in five. And Poland's cities lay in...
In This Grave Hour is the 13the book in the Maisie Dobbs series.

Learn about British life between the world wars from the Maisie Dobbs series

The 14 novels published to date in the Maisie Dobbs series are one of the most pleasurable ways to learn about British history from the First World War to the Second. (The 15th is due in 2019.) Author Jacqueline Winspear skillfully develops the themes that dominated British life during that...
Cover image of "The Mugger," the second in a series of police procedurals

When mugging turns to murder

Novelists have been turning out stories about crime since the early 1800s, and private detectives entered into the picture not long after. But police investigators didn't gain a firm hold in the mystery and suspense genre until well into the twentieth century. And it wasn't until the 1950s that...
Permafrost is about time travel and the apocalypse.

Time travel and the apocalypse

You'd think that an established author like Alastair Reynolds who has written eighteen novels, six novellas, and more short stories than I could possibly count would know how to structure a story so readers could understand what on earth (or off it) he hoped to get across. Well, I'm sorry to say...
Da Vinci Code sequel Inferno by Dan Brown

So, he wrote The Da Vinci Code. What else can he do?

A review of Inferno, by Dan Brown. @@@ (3 out of 5). Dan Brown’s fourth novel about Harvard art historian Robert Langdon and his perilous misadventures in Europe.

Cover image of "Bios," a novel about genetically engineered colonists

Struggling for life in a hostile alien environment

Somewhere in the vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of stars and innumerable planets in orbit around them, intelligent life must have arisen. The circumstances of our emergence on Earth are unusual. But it's hubris of the highest order to insist that they're unique amid...
Cover image of a book about the Sixth Extinction

Are we living through the Sixth Extinction?

You probably know that you and I—actually, all of us collectively, homo sapiens the species—are responsible for a truly alarming reduction in the number of other species on Planet Earth. But apart from occasional stories in the media about endangered polar bears and black rhinos and the like, you...
Cover image of "Red Rising," a sci-fi novel about Roman gods in the future

Roman gods in the 30th Century?

Red Rising, and its two sequels in the trilogy of the same name, have been hailed as the equal of the Hunger Games Trilogy. The series' hero, Darrow, has been likened to Ender Wiggin of Orson Scott Card's classic four-book science fiction series as well as Katniss Everdeen of the Hunger Games. I...
Cover image of "Death of a Dissident," one of the classic police procedurals in this series

Police procedurals spanning modern Russian history

From 1981 to 2009, the late Stuart Kaminsky wrote a series of sixteen Russian mystery novels centered on Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov and his team in the Soviet, and later Russian, Ministry of Internal Affairs. The novels trace the evolution of the country's history from the final years...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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