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!

 

Coverr image of "To Shield the Queen," an Elizabethan mystery

Mysteries set in Elizabethan England

Her story is well known. The reign of Elizabeth I (1533-1603) marked the emergence of England onto the world stage. During the forty-five years of her reign, Elizabeth's fleet defeated the world's most powerful navy (albeit by lucky chance) and kept the predatory powers of the Continent at bay...
Cover image of "The War Girls,"

Life in wartime Warsaw before the Ghetto Uprising

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes The "war girls" of the title are three young Polish women whose lives we follow from the Nazi invasion to the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. Stefa Majewski is Jewish. Stefa lives in the city with her parents, Izreal and Rose, and her teenage...
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 "A Hero of France," a novel that elicits shouts of Vive la Resistance!

Alan Furst’s “A Hero of France”: Vive la Resistance!

Alan Furst's latest novel opens in Paris in March 1941, approximately nine months after Hitler's armies entered the city. The action that follows concludes the following year. During that time, a Parisian businessman code-named Mathieu coordinates a cell in what came to be called the French...
Cover image of "An Honorable Man" by Paul Vidich, a novel about the early CIA

The Cold War, the early CIA, and the McCarthy Era

Half a century ago we learned from John le Carré about amorality and corruption in the world of espionage. Other authors have written hundreds of books about spies since then. Some, including Alan Furst, Charles Cumming, Olen Steinhauer, Dame Stella Rimington, and Joseph Kanon, for example, have...
Cover image of "Troublesome Young Men,"

How a team of rebel Tories ousted Neville Chamberlain

You may have the impression that Winston Churchill stood alone in warning England of the rising Nazi menace. Many histories of the period paint that picture. But it's not accurate. In fact, a group of younger Conservative MPs were vocal opponents of the Tory Establishment's policy of appeasement...
Dreyer's English advises how to write clear English.

A top copyeditor explains how to write clear English

So, chances are you're convinced you know perfectly well how to write clear English. But, just to be sure, take this quick quiz: How many of these rules do you follow when you write? Never begin a sentence with "and" or "but." Never split an infinitive. Never end a sentence with a preposition....
Groucho Marx and the Broadway Murders, in which the comedian solves two murders

Groucho Marx solves two baffling murders

For most Americans who recognize the name, Groucho Marx was one of the three Marx Brothers who headlined a series of 1930s Hollywood comedies, most famously Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera. Yet to me he was the hilarious host of the radio and, later, television...
Trading in Danger is the first book in a military science fiction series.

The launch of a promising military science fiction series

From 2003 to 2008, Elizabeth Moon published five books in the Vatta's War series. The first two books in a new series, Vatta's Peace, followed in 2017 and 2018. Trading in Danger, the first of these seven books, introduces Kylara Vatta, the nineteen-year-old scion of a wealthy family with an...
Cover image of 'The Tycoons," an account of US economic history in the nineteenth century

The Robber Barons who dominated the Gilded Age

A few other names crop up from time to time. But the four men who rode atop the wave of the Gilded Age were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. Their business activities during the final four decades of the nineteenth century drove America's ascension into the most...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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