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 "A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men,"

A history of Britain’s special forces through four remarkable men

The subtitle of Shannon Monaghan's book, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men: The Forgotten British Special Operations Soldiers of World War II, gave fair warning. Unfortunately, I missed the point. In no way could the men of Britain's SOE, SAS, Commando, and other World War II special forces units...
Cover image of "Shift" a dystopian novel by Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey’s dystopian novel with a twist

Hugh Howey debuted with a big splash as a science fiction writer with the publication of Wool. This three-part dystopian novel (really, a novella plus two full-length books) tells the tale of the Silo, an underground city of several thousand future Americans that descends through 144 stories into...
Cover image of "Fall of a Cosmonaut," about a crime aboard a Russian space station

Politics and intrigue bedevil the police in Yeltsin’s Russia

From 1986 to 2001, the massive Russian space station Mir ("peace") hurtled around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, circling the planet approximately every hour and a half. Usually, three cosmonauts lived aboard for periods lasting from several months to over a year. Cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka...
Cover image of "Stormy Weather,"

A hurricane, scam artists, a love story, and a homicidal water buffalo It’s Florida.

Welcome to the wild and wacky world of Carl Hiaasen. If anyone is better qualified to chronicle the madness unfolding in the state of Florida, I can't think of who that might be. Hiaasen portrays the state as wracked by superstorms, shredded by misbegotten and unregulated development, and overrun...
Cover image of "A Heart Full of Headstones," a novel about police misbehavior

Inspector Rebus returns. Is it his last case?

Since his early days as a patrolman in the 1970s, Detective Inspector John Rebus has "bent every rule to breaking point in pursuit of results, regarding every unsolved case as an affront." He's earned more than his share of attention from "the Complaints," as Police Scotland's internal affairs...
The Assault on Intelligence presents the case against Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s war on the intelligence community: a view from the inside

Mike Hayden is the former Director of the NSA and the CIA and a retired four-star US Air Force general. He is a Republican. Under normal circumstances, you'd expect such a man to support any Republican President. But these aren't normal times. They haven't been for the past three years or so. And...
Darwin's Radio

A brilliant novel about accelerated evolution

Evolutionary biologists tend to agree with Charles Darwin that new species can emerge only gradually over many generations. But in recent decades some have advanced a contrarian view termed punctuated equilibrium, or what I prefer to call fast-tracked evolution. They contend that evolution...
Cover image of "A Shipwreck in Fiji,"

WWI German sailors turn up . . . in Fiji?

When Americans think of World War I, we conjure up images of trench warfare on the Western Front. But the conflict was, of course, global. Most of the fighting took place in Europe and the Middle East. But Germans clashed with Allied forces in Africa, China, Siberia, off the coasts of North and...
Across a Billion Years depicts an advanced alien civilization.

A science fiction master imagines a uniquely advanced alien civilization

Every science fiction fan must be familiar with Robert Silverberg. The man has written more than 300 books, most of them SF. He won the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFFWA) in 2003—a rare honor that goes only to the best in the business. If you read a...
Maisie Dobbs review of To Die But Once

Maisie Dobbs, Dunkirk, and the war at home in England

In the spring of 1940, World War II had been underway in Europe for more than half a year, but the violence had yet to come home to England. Suddenly, on May 10, Hitler's legions rumbled across the borders of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and, finally, France. The 300,000-man British Expeditionary...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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