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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

The top mystery and thriller award winners

The top mystery and thriller award winners

Most citations of awards in the mystery, thriller, and suspense field mention the Edgar, Gold Dagger, Anthony, and International Thriller Writer Awards. But the categories used by these four awards don’t match. And as you’ll see, the awards themselves don’t often, either. For...

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NONFICTION

Vladimir Putin, the KGB, and the restoration of Soviet Russia

Vladimir Putin, the KGB, and the restoration of Soviet Russia

Every once in a while I'm shocked to learn anew that the American news media has missed the mark in its reporting of events around the world. Masha Gessen's portrait of third-term Russian President Vladimir Putin, The Man Without a Face, is an excellent case in point. Now, a...

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Popular Fiction

Why do some novels win literary awards?

Why do some novels win literary awards?

Let's see if we can figure out why this paper-thin work of fiction won wide recognition and a literary award for its author. Snow Hunters introduces . . . let's count them: eight characters in 226 pages: Yohan, a North Korean soldier captured by UN forces late in the Korean...

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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 "Five Lieutenants,"

A view from the American trenches in the First World War

Twenty-nine-year-old Richard Newhall was teaching history at Harvard. Younger at 22, George Haydock, a Quaker, was a recent graduate, as was Alexander McKinlock a wealthy football hero. Younger still, William Morgan was an undergraduate there. By contrast, graduate George Redwood was a celerated...
Cover image of "Winter in Madrid,"

A spy story set in WWII Spain

Journalist Harry Brett had visited Spain in 1931 with a schoolmate, Bernie Piper, and returned six years later. Then, Bernie had gone missing while fighting along with Communist volunteers against Franco’s nationalist forces. It's now another three years later, 1940-41, and the civil war is in the...
Cover image of "The Lost Boy," a Swedish thriller

A Swedish thriller without crazed serial killers

If you read Scandinavian noir but have had your fill of deranged serial killers, pick up a copy of The Lost Boy by Camilla Läckberg. Like the preceding novels in her bestselling Fjällbacka series, The Lost Boy shines with in-depth characterization and complex plotting that...
Odds Against Tomorrow is a novel about obsession.

A novel about obsession, natural disaster, and business in New York

It's hard not to feel at least a little like Mitchell Zukor. From an early age, Mitchell has been obsessed with disaster. Not run-of-the-mill personal disaster such as getting shot down for a date or getting rejected on a college application, but real, honest-to-God catastrophe. An asteroid...
Cover image of "Ten Popes Who Shook the World," a brief Catholic Church history

Catholic Church history through the lives of 10 Popes

One-fifth of the world's eight billion people profess Roman Catholicism, giving the impression they all share same faith. But of course that's far from the truth. With 1.4 billion adherents today sprawled across six continents, the Catholic Church encompasses millions who subscribe to its most...
The Fight of the Century explores 100 years of landmark ACLU cases.

Reflecting on 100 years of landmark ACLU cases

Anthologies are, inevitably, uneven. No matter how tightly edited, the individual contributions necessarily vary in character and quality. And in an audiobook, the format in which I "read" this collection of essays about the landmark ACLU cases of the past century, the problem is compounded when...
Cover image of "Machinehood,"

Danger looms as AI approaches human-level sentience

Welga Ramirez is nearing her thirty-fifth birthday. She's a veteran of the Marine Special Forces but a little long in the tooth for a shield—a bodyguard—though the pills increase her strength and the speed of her reflexes. And at thirty-five she'll hit the limit. Platinum Shield Services only...
Cover image of "Cutting for Stone," a novel about surgery in action

A deeply affecting medical drama set in Ethiopia

Marion Stone is a general surgeon at a charity hospital in New York City, and this is his story. It's a story of war, revolution, and painful separations, but equally a tale of compassion, love, and the power of life-saving surgery. Born of Indian parents and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,...
Cover image of "The Last Kings of Shanghai,"

The foreign businessmen who helped build modern China

Ever since the close of World War II eight decades ago, stories have been surfacing about heroic men and women who saved Jews from certain death in the Holocaust at great risk to their own lives. Names such as Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200, and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved several thousand,...
Cover image of "Orbitsville," a British First Contact story

This long-forgotten “classic” SF should stay that way

A reader alerted me to Bob Shaw's award-winning 1975 novel, Orbitsville, reporting that it had appeared on some critic's list of the best science fiction of all time. Not only that, but it's a First Contact story, a category I love to explore. How could I resist? I'd never heard of the novel, or...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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