The Latest

Books about extraordinary women

Books about extraordinary women

You won’t recognize some of the names on this list of exceptional women. Most were little known even in their own time. They represent a wide range of activities, from espionage to politics to science and to running their countries. But what they have in common with the three...

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SCIENCE FICTION

First Contact deep in the Amazon rainforest

First Contact deep in the Amazon rainforest

What can I say about a book that could have been great but isn't? In Entropy, the 31st entry in his long-running series of standalone novels about First Contact with alien intelligence, Australian author Peter Cawdron tells a gripping story about the crash of a private jet deep...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

Books about extraordinary women

Books about extraordinary women

You won’t recognize some of the names on this list of exceptional women. Most were little known even in their own time. They represent a wide range of activities, from espionage to politics to science and to running their countries. But what they have in common with the three...

read more

Popular Fiction

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

Today, Rwanda is one of the brightest lights in Africa. The economy is booming. Corruption is rare. Government delivers services. The streets of Kigali, the capital, are clean. It's even easy to open a business. Thirty years ago the country was in chaos, as this award-winning...

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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 "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...
Cover image of "Blood Test" by Jonathan Kellerman, a complex murder mystery

This complex murder mystery hinges on the symptoms of schizophrenia

Most genre authors are generalists who bring little special knowledge to their writing. There are exceptions, of course. For instance, science fiction authors who are actually scientists and the authors of police procedurals who serve, or have served, as cops. It's unusual, though, to find a...
Cover image of "Slow Horses," an example of British satire

British satire about misfit spies in MI5

The spies who work out of Slough House are "a post-useful crew of misfits [who] can be stored and left to gather dust." Every one of them. MI5 has dumped them all there after they screwed up royally. Now they labor at menial tasks under the direction of a misanthropic ex-operative named Jackson...
Cover image of "Black Water," a historical thriller

An historical thriller that doesn’t thrill

Imagine: you're going to write a book about a man nearing the age of 60, who was born in 1942 in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. (Yes, it's 1998 now.) His mother was Dutch, his father a dark-skinned Dutch-Indonesian soldier in the Dutch Army. At the age of five, his mother moved with...
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 Man Who Walked Like a Bear," a novel about crime in the Soviet Union

An honest detective confronts reality in Soviet Russia

Award-winning Chicago-based mystery author Stuart Kaminsky wrote sixteen police procedurals featuring an honest Russian detective named Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. The first of these novels, Death of a Dissident, appeared in 1981 and depicted crime in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev....
A History of Future Cities is a study of urbanization and globalization.

Urbanization, globalization and the future of humanity

The journey from developing world hinterland to globalizing city has become the defining journey of the twenty-first century," writes journalist Daniel Brook. In his A History of Future Cities, Brook traces the story of that journey toward urbanization and globalization to 1703 in St....

From two experts: The coming Big Data revolution

A review of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schoeneberger and Kenneth Cukier. @@@@ (4 out of 5). An overview of the computer-based phenomenon that is playing an ever-larger role in our lives, our work, and our future, written by two world-class authorities in the field.

Cover image of "M: Son of the Century,"

An in-depth biographical novel about Benito Mussolini

On October 31, 1922, he entered office as the Prime Minister of Italy. He was 39 years of age. In the 1921 general election, his party, then known as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, had received 29,549 votes out of 6.7 million cast. How, then, did this ex-soldier, a corporal in the Italian...
Cover image of "Extreme Prey," a novel about left-wing extremists

Lucas Davenport takes on left-wing extremists

Lucas Davenport took his first bow on stage in 1989 with the publication of John Sandford's second novel, Rules of Prey. Now, 27 years and 26 books later in the Prey series, Davenport has left behind the bureaucratic hassles of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, where he led a team of...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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