The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

Dystopia unfolds through the eyes of a precocious 10-year-old

Dystopia unfolds through the eyes of a precocious 10-year-old

Since the publication of The Russian Debutante's Handbook in 2002 and Absurdistan four years later, Gary Shteyngart has deployed satire and humor to illuminate the human condition in our times. He followed those two novels with his first venture into dystopia, Super Sad True...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

An impressionistic history of the Russian Revolution

An impressionistic history of the Russian Revolution

For some unfathomable reason, Antony Beevor is one of Britain's most popular and widely read military historians. It's true that he knows a great deal about military matters. He's a former army officer and teaches at military staff colleges in Britain, the US, and other...

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Popular Fiction

This gorgeous Hollywood star was a brilliant inventor

This gorgeous Hollywood star was a brilliant inventor

Version 1.0.0 You might not think a biographical novel about a glamorous Hollywood star could figure in the history of World War II. But then you wouldn't reckon with the Austrian American actress Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000). Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna to a nonobservant Jewish...

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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 "A Tap on the Window," a small town thriller

An engrossing small town thriller

This is the first time I've stumbled across Linwood Barclay. It turns out, though, that A Tap on the Window is one of fifteen novels he's written, most of them, like this one, detective fiction. Barclay is a US-born Canadian author who has won awards for his mysteries. I find it amazing that,...
Cover image of "Merchants in the Temple," a book about the vatican

Pope Francis’ battle against corruption in the Vatican

It's well known that the history of the Catholic Church is rife with tales of corruption and murder—and that internal conflicts roiling the Church continue today over pedophile priests, the role of women, divorce, and gay marriage as well as theology. What's less well known are the particulars...
Cover image of "The List," a novella in Mick Herron's Slough House series

Bumbling spies again in Mick Herron’s Slough House series

MI5 officer John Bachelor has already been put out to pasture, in a manner of speaking. For some time now, it's been his job to track several former foreign assets who have retired to England. Then one of them, Dieter Hess, suddenly dies—and John has a problem. A big problem. Diana Taverner, a...
The Plot

A plot within a plot within a plot

Writing in the Washington Post (May 16, 2021), Maureen Corrigan says The Plot is "the best thriller of the year (so far)." And according to the book jacket, Stephen King calls it "insanely readable." I wonder why. True, the novel is unusually well written. The plot is clever, the story well-paced...
December 6 is a thriller set in Imperial Japan.

A standalone novel from the author of the Arkady Renko stories

Martin Cruz Smith is best known for the eight bestselling novels (with the ninth now on the way) about police detective Arkady Renko in the USSR and, later, Russia. However, he has written nearly two dozen other books, including two other series of thrillers and a number of standalone novels....
Cover image of "Nazi Billionaires," a book about Nazi war profiteers

The Nazi war profiteers who exploited slave labor

You might expect a book with the title Nazi Billionaires to feature the Krupp family, who manufactured steel and armaments for the Third Reich, and the men behind the chemicals giant I G Farben, notorious for producing the Zyklon B gas used to murder millions in the death camps. But both firms had...
Cover image of "Dressed for Death," a novel about corruption in Venice

Donna Leon writes again about corruption in Venice

In 1992, at the age of 50, a professor of English literature named Donna Leon published Death at La Fenice. The novel won a major award and set her off on writing a series of sequels, now numbering 25. Set in Venice, where Leon has been living for the past 25 years, these skillful police...
Cover image of "Elon Musk," a biography of the man behind Tesla and SpaceX

Elon Musk wants to build a colony on Mars (for real)

When I was a child, I was addicted to science fiction. Many of the novels I read then rhapsodized about human settlements on Mars, the moons of the outer planets, and among the stars beyond. That fantasy morphed into an expectation as the Apollo Project achieved its seemingly impossible dream of...

In a world of complexity, survival requires resiliency

Resiliency. Maybe that was what was lacking. In the opening pages of The Age of the Unthinkable, his book about resiliency, Joshua Cooper Ramo cites long-time Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's 2008 testimony to Congress on finding a "flaw" in his reasoning about how to manage the economy....
Cover image of "The girl who takes an eye for an eye," a new novel featuring Stieg Larsson's girl

Stieg Larsson’s “girl” is back: the Millennium series continues

Stieg Larsson's Millennium series was an international publishing phenomenon. Before Larsson's untimely death at the age of 50 in 2004, he had completed only three of the projected ten novels in the series: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (published in 2005), The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006),...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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