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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

The best spy novelists writing today

The best spy novelists writing today

The first espionage novels appeared early in the 19th century with the publication of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy in 1821 and The Bravo in 1831. A few other notable titles were published in the ensuing decades, and Sherlock Holmes got into the act around the turn...

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NONFICTION

Roger Ailes: the man who built Fox News and divided America

Roger Ailes: the man who built Fox News and divided America

As a teenager growing up in the 1950s in Lima, Ohio, (population 50,000 then), I learned that our local daily, The Lima News, had been purchased by a man named R. C. Hoiles. Hoiles lived in Orange County, California, and was a member of the John Birch Society. He owned a chain...

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Popular Fiction

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Shortly after the 19th century turned into the 20th, a medical sleuth named George Soper, whom we would today call an epidemiologist, identified a young Irish immigrant cook in New York City as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever. Her name was Mary...

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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!

 

Impact by Douglas Preston

“Impact” by Douglas Preston: In a thriller, is suspense its own reward?

Start out on the coast of Maine with a brilliant 20-year-old Princeton dropout and her less-brilliant friend puzzling over a meteor shower, cut to CalTech where office politics and other shenanigans are in full flower at the National Propulsion Facility, add one former CIA agent dispatched to the...
Cover image of "The First Tycoon," one of the good books by Berkeley authors.

Good books by Berkeley writers

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think so. So far as I can tell, people living in what has become my home town of Berkeley, California, have been writing an inordinate number of really good books in recent years. That's probably because the town attracts creative people like . . . well, should I...
Cover image of "The Long Ships," a Viking saga

A Viking saga reminiscent of myth and legend

For nearly three centuries (793–1066 CE) during the Middle Ages, Norsemen from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway ran rampant through Europe from present-day Russia to Spain, England, France, Italy, and Ireland. Called Vikings, they raided coastal communities all around the European continent, plundering...
rural Minnesota: Mad River by John Sandford

John Sandford’s latest bestseller: Murder on the run in rural Minnesota

A review of Mad River, by John Sandford. @@@ (3 out of 5). Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension follows up on a brutal and seemingly senseless murder in a small rural town and finds himself in competition with an unsavory local Sheriff to end a murder spree.

Cover image of "The Wager," an 18th-century maritime drama

This bestselling maritime drama is hard to put down

History books can be dull and difficult to read, but they don't have to be—and David Grann's Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder is proof positive. In The Wager, he's woven the facts into an engrossing story that held my attention to the last page. As he'd proved in his earlier book, Killers of...
Cover image of "A Man Without Breath," a novel about mass murder in WWII

Mass murder in the Katyn Forest

In the spring of 1940, Josef Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, systematically murdered some 22,000 Poles. Among the victims were half the members of the Polish officer corps, police officers, government representatives, royalty, and leading members of Poland's civilian population. More than 4,000...
Cover image of "March," a Civil War novel

This Civil War novel brings hidden truths to light

Skim the list of past Pulitzer and National Book Award-winners. You won't find there many that appear familiar years after their publication. But March, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006, seems destined to be read far into the future. Like Geraldine Brooks' other works of historical...

Homophobia, rape, murder in the New South

A review of Blindsighted, by Karin Slaughter. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Blindsighted, set in rural Grant County in Southern Georgia, focuses on Dr. Sara Linton, the 30-something town pediatrician and part-time coroner; her ex-husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, who is Chief of Police; and Lena Adams, a young detective.

The Spin Trilogy concludes with Vortex.

The Spin Trilogy concludes with the heat death of the universe

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes The action in Vortex revolves around two couples: Sandra and Bose, and Turk and Allison. Both women are physicians, but their circumstances could hardly be different. They live on different planets separated by 10,000 years. Bose is a police officer on Earth in...
Mistress of the Ritz is an unconventional tale of the French Resistance.

Resistance, and collaboration, among the rich and famous of Paris

Here's an unconventional tale of the French Resistance. History tells us that a man named Claude Auzello (1898?-1969) was the managing director of the fabled Hotel Ritz in Paris during World War II. In 1923, he married an aspiring American film actress who gave her name as Blanche Ross...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

Weekly book reviews to match your taste!

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Mal Warwick

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…includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.

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