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...

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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...

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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...

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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.

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

Happy reading!

 

The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler involves American vs German spies.

American vs German spies in the Mexican Revolution

The early years of the twentieth century were a time of extraordinary upheaval. In China, first the Boxer Rebellion, then the 1911 Chinese Revolution. In South Africa, the Second Boer War (1899-02) and, across the globe, the Philippine-American War (1899-02) that came on the heels of the...
Photo of Donna Woolfolk Cross, author of this novel about a female Pope

When a woman sat on the Papal throne

One of the greatest controversies in the history of the Catholic Church surrounds the papacy of a ninth-century woman known to us as Pope Joan (Ioannes Anglicus). According to innumerable sources in Church records for centuries after her death in 855, her short reign (853-55) was an historical...
Cover image of "That Dangerous Energy," a novel about tackling climate change

Tackling climate change—in bed

Readers may know Aya de León as the author of the four books published to date in her Justice Hustlers series of thrillers. Four have appeared to date among her eleven novels. But all her work so far shares an outspoken progressive perspective and highlights an activist approach to today's social...
Cover image of "Clark and Division,"

Murder strikes a WWII Japanese American family

Aki Ito arrives in Chicago with her family in January 1944 expecting to find her glamorous big sister, Rose, waiting for them. Finally, the family is reuniting after two years in the desert concentration camp of Manzanar. But Rose is missing. And all too soon, Aki learns that her beloved sister...
Cover image of "Old Man's War," a sci-fi novel reminiscent of the pulp magazines

A sci-fi novel that harkens back to the bad old days of the pulp magazines

If you're old enough to remember those space operas (otherwise called space westerns) that crowded the pages of the pulp sci-fi magazines in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, you might have been a fan, since you were certainly young enough to enjoy them. I didn't. I thought even then that the stories were...
Cover image of "The House by the Lake," a book of 20th-century German history

An intimate take on 20th-century German history

There are several ways to approach history. You can focus on the broad political and social trends in society at large and how they evolve over time. You can look into the history of technology, or business, the arts, or any other single discipline. Or you can study the leading individuals whose...
Resistant is a doomsday thriller.

Resistant germs threaten humanity in this doomsday thriller

There's no end of doomsday scenarios that threaten the survival of the human race. These days, we talk about the climate crisis. Nuclear war sometimes, too. Pandemics. And of course there are many others: a super-volcano eruption, a meteorite strike, a massive solar flare, and many others. But now...
Cover image of "Deadly Memory," a novel about a dinosaur who survived the extinction

Paleontologists unearth a deadly weapon—and a killer virus

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes This dinosaur survived the Cretaceous Extinction. His name is Sweet Blood of Easy Prey Just After Slaughter, but they don't know that. He's Charlie to them. He's only about five feet tall, so he's not unmanageably large. And now they've got him locked up deep...
Cover image of "Poets and Murder,"

A Tang Dynasty judge solves a string of baffling murders

For readers in the USA or Europe, it can be a challenge to understand law enforcement policies and procedures in countries grounded in non-Western values and assumptions. In China, for example. The Inspector Chen novels of the Chinese expatriate author Qiu Xiaolong show just how very different...
The Jury Master is a thriller that thrills but then falls flat.

From Robert Dugoni, a thriller that thrills but falls flat in the end

When I read a thriller, I'm looking for several things. I hope the lead will grab me. I count on the author's ability to build tension and suspense steadily throughout the book. And I look for settings and circumstances that engage my curiosity. After all, isn't it reasonable to expect the...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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