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 "The Dying Day," a mystery based on ciphers

A baffling mystery based on ciphers

A teaser on the cover of the edition I read promises a tale of "a priceless manuscript, a missing scholar, and a trail of riddles." And so it is. The ciphers, codes, and wordplay in the second entry in Vaseem Khan's Malabar House series call to mind Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and a smattering...
The Second Rider is the first book in a new series of detective novels.

The debut of a rewarding series of detective novels set in Vienna after World War I

Vienna, November 1919. The Great War had ended one year earlier, and the capital city of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire was in shock. "The once glamorous seat of the empire had become a filthy, bloodthirsty beast." Demobilized soldiers wandered the streets, haunted by their experiences on the...
Jade Dragon Mountain

An intriguing murder mystery set in 18th century China

It's 1708, and the still-young Qing Dynasty is consolidating its power. The Kangxi Emperor, second in the dynastic line, plans a year-long journey to loosely-held Yunnan Province to secure the allegiance of the local people. He will arrive in 1708 in time for a mammoth festival, where he will...
Cover image of "The Hidden Child," a novel in which a Nazi medal figures prominently

A Nazi medal in Sweden triggers a journey into the past

Once upon a time French classicists derived the principles of drama from Aristotle's Poetics, proclaiming the "three unities." This restrictive concept required that a play depict only a single action that takes place in a single location within a single day. These rules didn't last long. But...
From Warsaw With Love

The colorful alliance between Polish spies and the CIA

Poland today appears to be evolving into fascism. But it's not the mirror image of what it was for more than four decades under the iron thumb of the Soviet Union. The country is no longer a police state. Democracy of a sort is in place, and capitalism reigns. The country's membership in the...
Cover image of "The Redeemers," a novel filled with Southern-fried violence

Good ol’ boys and Southern-fried violence

Quinn Colson is a classic action hero. He was a sergeant in the Army Rangers, serving for 13 deployments over ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several years previously he returned home to Tibbehah County in northern Mississippi to pick up where he left off with his high-school girlfriend, now...

From John Sandford, an eminently satisfying Lucas Davenport novel

A review of Phantom Prey, by John Sandford. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Phantom Prey, like others I’ve read in the series, is a flawlessly executed tale built around a complex and unusual plot. A young heiress, Frances Austin, has disappeared, leaving behind spatters of her blood in her mother’s house that suggest she was murdered, but she has apparently withdrawn $50,000 from an investment account and colected it in cash, suggesting that perhaps she was not murdered but has simply fled. Other murders take place in close succession, linked to the heiress through friendship. .

Cover image of "Five Lieutenants,"

A view from the American trenches in the First World War

Twenty-nine-year-old Richard Newhall was teaching history at Harvard. Younger at 22, George Haydock, a Quaker, was a recent graduate, as was Alexander McKinlock a wealthy football hero. Younger still, William Morgan was an undergraduate there. By contrast, graduate George Redwood was a celerated...
Cover image of "Testimony," a legal thriller by Scott Turow

Crimes against humanity in Scott Turow’s latest legal thriller

In an interview on May 23, 2017, Scott Turow explained how he came to write a legal thriller about a case at the International Criminal Court involving the massacre of 400 Roma (“Gypsies”). “‘In 2000, I was at a reception in The Hague and found myself in a circle of lawyers who said you have to...
Rogue Protocol features sci-fi's favorite antisocial A.I.

Sci-fi’s favorite antisocial A.I. surfaces again in the Murderbot Diaries

Martha Wells has been writing science fiction since 1995 and was nominated for major awards in the field on several occasions. But her breakthrough came in 2018 when she won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and the American Library Association's Alex Award for All Systems Red. That book kicked off what is...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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