The Latest

They grew the country’s vegetables

They grew the country’s vegetables

If you watched the HBO drama Succession, you'll have a sense of what happened to the once-famous Seabrook frozen-food dynasty. Succession features a tyrannical "self-made" founder, hideous corporate crime, cynical right-wing politics, sibling rivalry, backstabbing, and worse....

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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A tense medical thriller from a master of the craft

A tense medical thriller from a master of the craft

If you're fond of reading medical thrillers, you've probably come across the names of the leading practitioners of the craft. Tess Gerritsen, for example, author of The Surgeon. Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain). Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay...

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NONFICTION

They grew the country’s vegetables

They grew the country’s vegetables

If you watched the HBO drama Succession, you'll have a sense of what happened to the once-famous Seabrook frozen-food dynasty. Succession features a tyrannical "self-made" founder, hideous corporate crime, cynical right-wing politics, sibling rivalry, backstabbing, and worse....

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 "The Mugger," the second in a series of police procedurals

When mugging turns to murder

Novelists have been turning out stories about crime since the early 1800s, and private detectives entered into the picture not long after. But police investigators didn't gain a firm hold in the mystery and suspense genre until well into the twentieth century. And it wasn't until the 1950s that...
Cover image of "Everyone Brave Is Forgiven," a novel about the human cost of war

The human cost of World War II

Here is Britain's World War II as viewed through the perspective of five young people. Their varied and often cruel experiences stand in for the evil and disruption of the war that comes to upend all their lives. The action unfolds month by month from September 1939, when Britain enters the war,...
Cover image of "River of Darkness," the first of Rennie Airth's series of British police procedurals

Rennie Airth’s John Madden series spans the world wars

In six suspenseful crime novels set in England from the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, South African writer Rennie Airth tells the story of Scotland Yard detective John Madden and his wife, née Dr. Helen Blackwell. John is a veteran of the Great War, unhinged by his experiences in...

Big-city violence in small-town Georgia in a gritty and suspenseful tale

I sometimes find books with one-word titles frustrating. In the course of reading them, I may find myself wondering how on earth the title connects to the story. Sometimes I can't figure it out at all. Unseen is one of those titles that continues to puzzle me. Despite this minor flaw (if in fact...
The Darwin Affair is about the original creationists.

When Charles Darwin threatened the stability of English society

Today's creationists and advocates of intelligent design are the direct descendants of the devout Christians who grew hysterical upon the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. For several years, the book, and Darwin himself, were widely regarded as a threat to the...
Cover image of "Fall of a Cosmonaut," about a crime aboard a Russian space station

Politics and intrigue bedevil the police in Yeltsin’s Russia

From 1986 to 2001, the massive Russian space station Mir ("peace") hurtled around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, circling the planet approximately every hour and a half. Usually, three cosmonauts lived aboard for periods lasting from several months to over a year. Cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka...
Eskimo history: Shaman Pass by Stan Jones

Eskimo history and culture are this novel’s leading characters

A review of Shaman Pass: A Nathan Active Mystery, by Stan Jones. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Jones delves deeply into the history of the Inupiat (“Eskimo”) people of Alaska. The shaman referred to in the title, though long dead, figures as a major character in the novel when his mummy is stolen en route from the Smithsonian Institution to the Inupiat community that has voted to put it on display in a tourist museum to raise money. Then the president of the community is mysteriously murdered, and Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active finds himself confronted with a devilishly complex hunt for the killer.

Cover image of "A Conspiracy of Faith" by Jussi Adler-Olsen, a novel about religious fanaticism

A captivating tale of religious fanaticism, blackmail, and serial murder

The bestselling Danish thriller writer Jussi Adler-Olsen ranks among Scandinavia's top literary exports. A Conspiracy of Faith, the third entry in his Department Q series of detective novels, matches the first two books in suspense, intensity, and complexity with a tangled tale of religious...
Cover image of "The Wages of Sin" by Katie Walsh, a Victorian-era murder mystery

A Victorian-era murder mystery set in Edinburgh

"Once a respected, if rebellious, daughter of a financier, now I was a fallen woman in the eyes of society, a moral degenerate who aped men by studying medicine . . ." The degenerate in question is 27-year-old Sarah Gilchrist. Because of a scandal we only later come to understand, Sarah has been...
Churchill's Shadow Raiders is about the theft of German radar technology.

How German radar technology helped Britain win World War II

Military historians tend to agree that radar played a singularly important role in the Allied victory in World War II, arguably greater than the decoding of the German Enigma codes (and certainly greater than the atomic bomb, which only ended the war). But British and American sources tend to...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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