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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

US Special Forces and the CIA collide in Cold War Berlin

US Special Forces and the CIA collide in Cold War Berlin

Veterans of intelligence agencies and the special forces crowd the ranks of spy novelists. Some have rightfully been hailed as masters of the craft—John le Carré, for example. Or, more recently, David McCloskey. Others have written worthy and suspenseful novels that illuminate...

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NONFICTION

Popular Fiction

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

Today, Rwanda is one of the brightest lights in Africa. The economy is booming. Corruption is rare. Government delivers services. The streets of Kigali, the capital, are clean. It's even easy to open a business. Thirty years ago the country was in chaos, as this award-winning...

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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!

 

Tomorrow's Kin is hard sci-fi about evolutionary biology.

Hard science fiction doesn’t get much better than this

In most first contact stories, human meets alien, and then something happens. Whether the aliens are evil or benign, the tale centers on whatever happens in their interaction. That's not the case in Tomorrow's Kin, the first volume in Nancy Kress's engrossing Yesterday's Kin Trilogy. The contact...
Cover image of "The Consequences of Fear," a book about British intelligence

Maisie Dobbs investigates a murder involving British intelligence

Twelve-year-old Freddie Hackett is the fastest runner in his school and has secured a job as a nighttime courier for British intelligence. As the bombs fall all over London, Freddie runs from one site to another through the rubble-strewn streets. And on one such run on October 3, 1941 he witnesses...
Cover image of "Watch Me Disappear," a novel about a woman who is presumed dead

She’s missing, presumed dead, and now the mystery starts

Gone Girl and its many less successful imitators have crowded bookstore shelves in recent years, so my natural tendency is to yawn when I come across another novel that marketers or critics compare to it. However, Janelle Brown's new thriller, Watch Me Disappear, merits the comparison. A...
Cover image of "The Second Girl," a novel about drug traffickers

An anti-hero ex-cop takes on drug traffickers

Frankie Marr is not a good guy. After seventeen years on the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police, he was forced to retire when the brass discovered he had been helping himself to the drugs recovered in narcotics busts. Now, he works as a private eye to supplement his meager police pension. To feed...
Cover image of "The Fools in Town Are On Our Side," one of the 100 best mysteries

Definitely one of the 100 best mysteries of all time

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes For extended periods over the past several decades, I've been reading mysteries by the carload. I thought that by now I'd be reasonably familiar with the best writers in the genre. Somehow, I missed Ross Thomas, who penned twenty-three crime novels between 1966...
Cover image of "A Credible Threat," a novel about stalking

Stalking and murder at UC Berkeley

A young man named Ted Macauley is stalking two undergraduate women at UC Berkeley. Someone, presumably the same man, has been calling the Elmwood District house they share with several other students and hanging up without speaking. And now the residents have returned to find all the flowers in...
Cover image of "The Association of Small Bombs," a novel about islamic terrorism

Islamic terrorism, from the inside and out

It's 1996. Two brothers, ten and thirteen, walk into a busy Delhi market with their twelve-year-old friend. The brothers are Hindu, the friend, Muslim. As they arrive, a terrorist bomb explodes, instantly killing the two brothers but only slightly wounding their friend. Karan Mahajan's novel, The...
Cover image of "When the Bough Breaks," a novel about a child psychologist who solves a murder

When a child psychologist uncovers the key to solving a murder

The traumatizing sight of a dead body in his office, an apparent suicide, prompts child psychologist Alex Delaware to retire prematurely at the age of thirty-three. A successful real estate investor, he has the resources to support a more than comfortable lifestyle and is determined to forsake the...
Cover image of "Lady Clementine," a biographical novel about Winston Churchill's wife

She edited Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches

Most accounts of World War II show Winston Churchill facing off alone against Adolf Hitler as he rallied the British people to unprecedented heights of heroism. But "Winston wasn’t alone during World War II—even though he’s always pictured that way." As Marie Benedict shows in her novel, Lady...
Cover image of "The Ambassador," an alternate history of Israel

An alternate history of Israel and World War II

Alternate history abounds with stories that picture Nazi Germany winning World War II. Fatherland by Robert Harris. SS-GB by Len Deighton. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. And a great many more. So, it's refreshing to come across an original what-if scenario on the war such as Yehuda...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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