The Latest

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shiya Ribowsky walked to work. It was a beautiful day, and he was in no hurry. As director of identifications at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), he knew death keeps its own schedule. Then the first plane struck...

read more

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

The Lincoln Lawyer takes AI to court

The Lincoln Lawyer takes AI to court

As I write, more than 20 lawsuits have been filed against the company OpenAI over the alleged misbehavior of its chatbot, ChatGPT. (I could find none against Anthropic's Claude.) Doubtless, more will surface as time goes on, especially in the face of fast-growing reports that...

read more

NONFICTION

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shiya Ribowsky walked to work. It was a beautiful day, and he was in no hurry. As director of identifications at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), he knew death keeps its own schedule. Then the first plane struck...

read more

Popular Fiction

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

The legendary English humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), known to readers as P. G., wrote about 100 books in a career that spanned much of the 20th century. His output included 71 novels, 24 collections of short stories, 42 plays, three memoirs, and a lot...

read more

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.

Check out our rotating random selection here, culled from throughout this site.

Happy reading!

 

Cover image of "Dead on Arrival" by Matt Richtel, a novel that shows what happens when neurology meets high-tech

Neurology meets high-tech in this gripping science fiction novel

Just imagine. You've landed at a small regional airport somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The world has gone silent. There's nothing but static on every channel on the radio. The body of a man in a jumpsuit lies sprawled on the tarmac, and human figures inside the terminal are motionless. Is this...
Cover image of "A Force So Swift" by Kevin Peraino, a book about modern China

Mao, Truman, and the birth of Modern China

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Most history books paint the past in broad strokes, covering dozens or hundreds of years. Yet some of the most engaging works drill down into the events of a particular time or place. Kevin Peraino has brilliantly used that approach in A Force So Swift: Mao,...
The Great Influenza is an account of the 1918 flu epidemic.

A brilliant account of the 1918 flu epidemic

A century ago a pandemic disease far more lethal than COVID-19 killed an estimated fifty to one hundred million people around the world—as many as one out of every twenty people then alive. The 1918 flu epidemic erupted during a war that had already killed tens of millions and at a time when...
But the Stars is about an alien encounter.

An alien encounter that questions the nature of reality

In the most recent of Australian Peter Cawdron's eleven standalone novels on the theme of First Contact, there's action aplenty. But the most meaningful developments are best described as psychological and philosophical. The small human crew on the spaceship Acheron never see any physical...
Factfulness is about the true state of the world.

The facts, just the facts, about the world as it really is

In the closing months of his life, as pancreatic cancer worked its painful way through his system, the legendary lecturer Hans Rosling (1948-2017) labored with his son and daughter-in-law to compile the lessons he had spent decades teaching about the state of the world. The result was this compact...
The Lost Man is an outstanding murder mystery.

A superb murder mystery set in the Australian outback

Imagine a whodunit without a detective, or an investigator of any sort, for that matter. Take a family of three brothers, their mother, one wife, two young children, and a long-time hired hand. Now, one of the brothers has died. Did he commit suicide? Or was it murder? And if it was, who did it?...
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...
Cover image of "World War II," one of the 20 top nonfiction books about WW2

20 top nonfiction books about World War II

Here are 20 nonfiction books that present a broad overview of World War II and the factors that led up to it. The list does not fully reflect the war’s global dimensions. It’s biased toward an American, British, and French point of view.

Cover image of "Landscape with Invisible Hand," a novel about an alien invasion

A clever new take on an alien invasion in a humorous young adult novel

Science fiction is full of clichés about alien invasions of Earth, some evil, some benign. The murderous rampaging monsters that lay waste to the planet. The enigmatic species so different from the human race and so far advanced that communication with them is virtually impossible. The humanoid...

In a world of complexity, survival requires resiliency

Resiliency. Maybe that was what was lacking. In the opening pages of The Age of the Unthinkable, his book about resiliency, Joshua Cooper Ramo cites long-time Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's 2008 testimony to Congress on finding a "flaw" in his reasoning about how to manage the economy....

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

Weekly book reviews to match your taste!

Love mysteries and thrillers? Historical fiction fan? Prefer to read nonfiction? Or, like me, you just love reading? Take your pick of my three weekly newsletters. Just click the Yes! button, and you’re on your way.

Here you can take your pick of the three newsletters I publish each week. They’re all free of ads, and I never share subscribers’ email addresses with anyone. Just make your newsletter selections below.

Feel free to subscribe to any or all of these newsletters. Remember, they’re ad-free, and I won’t share your contact information with anyone.

Enjoy reading!

Mal Warwick

The latest mystery
& thriller book
reviews every Tuesday.

…includes my latest mystery and thriller book reviews, with links to other content in the genre.

The latest nonfiction book reviews every Wednesday.

…includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.

My latest
book reviews,
every Thursday.

…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.

The Latest Book Reviews of the Week

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

You have Successfully Subscribed!

The Latest Mystery & Thriller Book
Reviews Every Week

Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

The Latest Nonfiction Book
Reviews Every Week

Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

The Latest Book Reviews of the Week

The Weekly 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.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Tuesday's Newsletter

Tuesday's Newsletter

Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Wednesday's Newsletter

Wednesday's Newsletter

Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

The Weekly Newsletter

Thursday's Newsletter

The Weekly 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.

You have Successfully Subscribed!