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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A young police detective pursues an escaped Nazi spy

A young police detective pursues an escaped Nazi spy

Nazi Germany reportedly dispatched as many as 135 spies to Britain during World War II. And, according to numerous historical accounts, every single one of them was either captured or turned themselves in to authorities. (At least one didn't fit the pattern, though. He...

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NONFICTION

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!

 

best crime novelist: The Leopard by Jo Nesbo

Is Jo Nesbo the world’s best crime novelist?

A review of The Leopard: A Harry Hole Novel, by Jo Nesbo. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Suspenseful tale of a serial killer in Norway, together with a character study of the deeply troubled detective on his trail.

Cover image of "Blackwater Falls," the debut of a series of small-town thrillers

The debut of a brilliant new series of small-town thrillers

Many of the eighty percent of Americans who live in cities are unaware of the demographic revolution underway in the vast rural stretches of our country. The Immigration Act of 1965 ushered in a flood of racial or ethnic minorities to rural America over the past half-century. They now account for...
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...
Cover image of "The Helsinki Affair,"

The assassination of a US Senator sets off a hunt for a CIA traitor

After 17 years as an officer in the CIA's Clandestine Service, Amanda Cole chafes under diplomatic cover in Rome as the economic attaché. She's bored. And her boss, three decades her senior, frustrates her every attempt to take the initiative. Then a nervous Russian walk-in describes a threat to...
Cover image of "Tool of War" by Paolo Bacigalupi, a Drowned Cities novel

From Paolo Bacigalupi, another spellbinding Drowned Cities tale

Paolo Bacigalupi's new novel, Tool of War, is a brilliant successor to Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, which together form a series the author may not yet have finished. The setting of all three novels is a dystopian world in what may be the twenty-second or twenty-third century. Much of...
Cover image of "The Map Thief,"

Did the Chinese discover America?

Mara Coyne is a non-practicing lawyer who specializes in recovering stolen art. Her firm consists of her business partner, a former director of the FBI Art Crime Unit we know only as Joe, and a handful of art historians and technical support staff. But their reputation is global. So it's no...
lessons for living: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

From the ashes of the Holocaust, a gift of lessons for living

A review of Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl. @@@@ (4 out of 5). The lessons learned by a leading psychiatrist from his experience as a prisoner in four Nazi concentration camps

The Virgin in the Ice highlights organized crime medieval style.

Organized crime medieval style, in a complex Brother Cadfael mystery

The Virgin in the Ice reveals more about the way English society was organized in the Middle Ages than any of the five books that precede it in the twenty-one-volume series of Brother Cadfael mysteries. The novel's predecessors all center on a murder or murders that the good monk is called upon to...
Cover image of "Red Harvest," a novel about a hard-boiled detective

The original hard-boiled detective?

Maybe he wasn't the original hard-boiled detective. But he was certainly among the first. His creator, Dashiell Hammett, called him "the Continental op." And the New York Times termed Hammett "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction" in its obituary in 1961. The debut of the...
The Comedians is about Haiti's reign of terror.

Haiti’s reign of terror in a classic Graham Greene novel

The term reign of terror has rarely been more apt than when it was applied to the regime of Haiti's François "Papa Doc" Duvalier (1907-71). The former country doctor was elected President of Haiti in 1957 on a black nationalist platform but turned tyrannical the following year after thwarting a...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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