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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

US Special Forces and the CIA collide in Cold War Berlin

US Special Forces and the CIA collide in Cold War Berlin

Veterans of intelligence agencies and the special forces crowd the ranks of spy novelists. Some have rightfully been hailed as masters of the craft—John le Carré, for example. Or, more recently, David McCloskey. Others have written worthy and suspenseful novels that illuminate...

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NONFICTION

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!

 

A Tip for the Hangman

This historical spy story ignores history

When historical novelists depart from the recorded facts of history on occasion, it's generally understandable. For example, in her excellent novel of the Wars of the Roses, The Kingmaker's Daughter, Philippa Gregory ignores the six-month interregnum in the reign of King Edward IV, and that...
Cover image of "A Burnable Book,"

A plot to assassinate the king in medieval England

Late in the 14th century, England continued to suffer from the factionalism and political instability that had bedeviled the country for centuries. The Black Death was a century in the past, and the population had begun to grow again. The earliest glimmers of the Reformation were introducing...
The Dispossessed

Ursula Le Guin explores anarchism and capitalism

The eight novels of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle don't read like science fiction. They're set on make-believe worlds, and the technology was in place in the mid-20th century. And the characters might have stepped out of an historical novel. The upshot is that the stories come across as more...
Judgment is Joseph Finder's new novel, a courtroom drama.

A high-stakes courtroom drama in Joseph Finder’s new novel

Juliana Brody is living the good life. She's "in her early forties, but as her mother liked to say immodestly, she had good genes." She's a respected judge on the Superior Court in Boston, and happily married with two teenage children. And she's touted to be in contention for Chief Justice of the...
Scattered Seeds

Eking out existence in a fast-changing world

For the people of the little community at the High Meadow Med Center, the world around them poses a growing threat. The government—whatever and wherever that may be—has shut down the train station they'd depended on for life-saving vaccines and food rations. The weather service no longer...
Cover image of "Gravity," a medical thriller in space

An action-packed medical thriller set in orbital space

Gravity opens in the Galápagos Rift nineteen thousand feet below the surface of the South Pacific. And it reaches a shattering conclusion two hundred twenty miles above the Earth. The connection between these two events, two years apart, lies at the heart of the mystery in this pulse-pounding...
The Legacy Human

After the singularity, immortality for billions

The singularity is history. Afterwards, centuries ago, the superhuman intelligence gained by machines enabled humans to "ascend," leaving their frail bodies of flesh and bone and uploading into what today we call the cloud. They're "vastly more intelligent, compassionate, and enlightened than any...
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 "Pietr the Latvian,"

Assessing the first of the Inspector Maigret novels

Belgian author Georges Simenon set a dubious record with the publication of 75 novels in his series about Paris police commissioner Jules Maigret. The Maigret novels are widely regarded as the longest-running series of crime novels ever written. But those 75 books constituted less than one-fifth...
Cover image of "London," the book involved when I asked how AI views a novel

A monumental historical saga of London spanning 2,000 years

Only once in the past 15 years since I began reviewing books have I written about anything without reading it to the end. But I'm about to break that rule for a second time. I'm doing so to convey some of what I've learned about the use of artificial intelligence as it might influence my craft. I...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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