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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A hilarious romp through the byways of small-town crime

A hilarious romp through the byways of small-town crime

To be clear at the outset, you should not expect a realistic picture of small-town crime when you read Justin Halpern's comic masterpiece, Get Lost. What you'll get instead is a fiendishly clever story that somehow involves a missing woman, corrupt almond farmers, a Big Box...

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NONFICTION

He could have been king. Or a dictator. He retired instead.

He could have been king. Or a dictator. He retired instead.

Myths and legends swirl around the life of George Washington. Remember that cherry tree? The wooden teeth? Throwing a coin across a wide river? The white wig? All of these widely accepted beliefs about our founding President are flatly untrue. And, just for the record, he was...

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Popular Fiction

American history, laughing all the way

American history, laughing all the way

Scoot yourself over, Huckleberry Finn! Make room! Here comes Henry Shackleford, aka Henrietta, aka Little Onion, with a tall tale ripped and twisted out of the pages of history that's like to set your britches afire. Yes, here's The Good Lord Bird, courtesy of James McBride, a...

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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!

 

In Axiom's End, aliens have visited Earth.

First Contact is old news in this sci-fi thriller

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes For nearly three-quarters of a century, reports have repeatedly surfaced in news media of UFOs and alien abductions in the United States. The names Roswell and Area 51 have become shorthand for conspiracy theories about "the government's" ongoing suppression of...
Brain Wave

How would you behave if your IQ suddenly doubled?

Just as history books often tell us more about historians than they do about history, genre fiction can reveal a great deal about its authors and the times during which they write. History books fall into disfavor as new information comes to light, making way for new interpretations of the facts....
The Next Civil War

Is a new American civil war inevitable?

The United States is coming to an end. The question is how. Every government, every business, every person alive will be affected by the answer." Thus opens Canadian journalist Stephen Marche's deeply disturbing assessment of America's prospects in the third decade of the 21st century. In five...
Silverview

A nostalgic look at espionage from John le Carré

Before the advent of spy satellites and the Internet, espionage was a game played out largely by people with only the most minimal intervention of machines. Not entirely so, of course. Nazi Germany had its Enigma machines, and Bletchley Park its analog and primitive digital computers to decipher...
Cover image of "The Man on the Balcony," one of the best police procedurals

The six best police procedurals

Police procedurals differ from other stories about investigations by police detectives in one fundamental way. The lead detective is not a lone wolf but a member of a team and often draws upon the resources of the whole department. In most detective novels, the central figure emerges as a hero,...
Cover image of "The Whitewashed Tombs,"

Anti-gay violence in West Africa erupts in this excellent mystery

Kwei Quartey has shined a bright light on life in contemporary Ghana in the ten mysteries and thrillers he has published to date. In his tenth novel, The Whitewashed Tombs, he writes about the persecution of people who identify as LGBTQ, pointing the finger at a massive nationwide campaign for...
irrepressible bounty hunter: Smokin Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

Laugh out loud with Trenton, New Jersey’s irrepressible bounty hunter

A review of Smokin’ Seventeen: A Stephanie Plum Novel, by Janet Evanovich. @@@ (3 out of 5). Stephanie Plum and her feisty sidekick, Lula, a former ho (and proud of it), find themselves in yet another improbable quandary in this latter-day Keystone Kops story.

The Woman in Cabin 10 is a #1 bestselling psychological thriller.

A #1 bestselling psychological thriller that’s suspenseful to the end

What can explain the success of a #1 bestselling psychological thriller? In The Woman in Cabin 10, British author Ruth Ware demonstrates one likely explanation with consummate skill. She combines elements of a whodunnit, a locked-room mystery, and an unreliable narrator without falling victim...
Cover image of "Gold of Our Fathers," a novel about gold mining in Ghana

Chinese illegally mine gold in Ghana

Shortly before the turn of the twenty-first century, Chinese interests began investing in the mining industry in Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Soon, Chinese money and people started showing up wherever in the continent minerals were abundant. And in Ghana the mineral in question was gold....
Harry Bosch's new partner costars in "Dark Sacred Night."

Harry Bosch’s new partner costars in “Dark Sacred Night”

In 2017, Michael Connelly introduced a tough new lead character in The Late Show. Renee Ballard is a 30-something LAPD detective who had been forced out of the elite Robbery-Homicide division when she complained about sexual harassment by a superior officer. She's now on the night shift in...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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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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