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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!

 

Unputdownable: A Heartbeat Away by Michael Palmer

What makes a thriller unputdownable?

A review of A Heartbeat Away, by Michael Palmer. @@@ (3 out of 5). So, here I am, reading a book that’s written without any special flair for language, about characters who are at best two-dimensional, in circumstances that are about as true to life as a James Bond adventure, and I’m loving the experience! Why is that?

Cover image of "Hell and Good Company," a book about the Spanish Civil War

An outsider’s take on the Spanish Civil War

In the Preface to Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made, Richard Rhodes writes "This book only incidentally concerns Spanish politics. . . I was drawn, rather, to the human stories that had not yet been told or had been told only incompletely. I was drawn as well to...
Cover image of "The Backup Men," a thriller about competing hit men

Skullduggery galore in this tale of competing hit men

Get ready for another wild ride in the lives of Mac McCorkle and Michael Padillo. Mac and Mike were co-owners of a saloon called Mac's Place, in Bonn, West Germany. Mac was a special-operations officer in Burma in World War II, Mike a spy and hit man for an unnamed U.S. government agency. (It's...
The 2020 Commission Report is a novel about a North Korean nuclear attack on the US.

When North Korean nukes fell on the United States

Recent news reports suggest that a North Korean nuclear attack is distinctly within the realm of possibility. And this new novel makes clear how it might actually happen. I grew up under the shadow of the nuclear umbrella. And, no, I wasn't the least bit reassured that that umbrella was supposedly...
Norwegian police: Nemesis by Jo Nesbo

Gypsies, bank robbers, and the Norwegian police

A review of Nemesis, by Jo Nesbo. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Idiosyncratic Norwegian detective Harry Hole finds himself suspected of killing an old girlfriend while he works to identify the killer in a bank robbery.

Cover image of "Karla's Choice,"

John le Carré’s son fills in the gap in George Smiley’s story

In the dramatic conclusion to John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, British intelligence officer Alec Leamas and the idealistic American Communist Liz Gold die as they climb the Wall toward freedom in the West, machine-gunned on the orders of the British agent they had entered East...
Mammoth

A time travel tale about wooly mammoths and an eccentric billionaire

The concept of time travel as it's typically treated in science fiction is a straightforward affair. You'll find that in almost any novel about time travel. Somebody figures out how to build a "time machine," steps into the chamber, and—presto, change-o—ends up somewhere back or forward in time....
Cover image of "Zealot," a book about anti-Semitism

Jesus of Nazareth and the origins of anti-Semitism

Leave it to a Muslim to strip away the myth and fantasy that define Christianity and paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth set squarely in the reality he experienced. Reza Aslan, Iranian refugee in America, fundamentalist Christian turned Muslim, brilliant scholar of comparative religion, gives us...
Cover image of "Rogue Lawyer" by John Grisham, a novel about American police

American police come off badly in John Grisham’s latest novel

It seems that John Grisham doesn't much like police or prosecutors, and that he's not wild about judges in general, either. As he writes in his latest courtroom drama, Rogue Lawyer, "The road to justice is filled with barriers and land mines, most of them created by men and women who claim to be...
Cover image of "Lethal Seasons," the first in a series of novels about recovering from the Apocalypse

This unusual post-Apocalyptic tale is hopeful

Most post-Apocalyptic novels portray a world gone irretrievably mad. Books such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, On the Beach by Nevil Shute, and Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, depict human life reduced to its lowest common denominator. But Alice Sabo's A Changed World series presents a very different...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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