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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

Fact vs fiction in the story of an outrageous WWII deception

Fact vs fiction in the story of an outrageous WWII deception

When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think "Normandy." After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces....

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NONFICTION

Fact vs fiction in the story of an outrageous WWII deception

Fact vs fiction in the story of an outrageous WWII deception

When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think "Normandy." After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces....

read more

Popular Fiction

Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

No one is still alive with any adult memory of World War I, which ended a century ago. So when we think of the events that have shaped the world we live in today it's likely World War II looms large. But its antecedent three decades earlier may have had greater long-term...

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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 "Siberian Dilemma," a novel about a Russian detective

Arkady Renko in Siberia: bears, billionaires, and death

When Martin Cruz Smith published the first of the Arkady Renko detective novels in 1981, no one could foresee that the series would still be going strong more than forty years later. But so it is. The resilient Russian detective has survived a decade of tussles with the KGB under Leonid Brezhnev...
The Woman in Black is a Hollywood mystery woman.

A Hollywood mystery woman, the Blacklist, and a legendary actor

In film history, the Woman in Black was a Hollywood mystery woman who left flowers on the grave of Rudolph Valentino for 58 years. Valentino was a silent film star who died in 1926 at the age of 31. Now, in his new novel of the same name, bestselling Berkeley author Erik Tarloff brings the story...
First Encounter is about a hostile First Contact.

Hostile First Contact in this promising prequel to a new sci-fi series

It's easy to see why this novel has been so popular with science fiction fans. In First Encounter, the prequel to a series titled Occupied Earth, author Jasper Scott has done a brilliant job of building suspense in a classic SF setting. While the book won't win any literary awards (at least not...
Cover image of "The Lady from Zagreb," a novel about a detective in Nazi Germany

Cynicism and romanticism in Nazi Germany

Philip Kerr has written a series of eleven novels featuring homicide detective Bernie Gunther in Nazi Germany. I hope there will be more. It's hard to resist characters who would think such things as this: "Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of...
Cover image of "Cast a Yellow Shadow," a novel about assassination

A novel about assassination that’s lots of fun

Here's a novel about political assassination, and it's a hoot from start to finish. Mac McCorkle is not your average saloon-keeper. His partner Mike Padillo -- his mother was Estonian, his father Spanish -- speaks "six or seven languages" fluently and has used them in dangerous undercover...
The Last Astronaut is a classic First Contact novel.

In a classic First Contact novel, astronauts meet . . . something very strange

If I'd taken the trouble to check out the author of this novel before picking it up to read, I probably would have decided not to do so. The man writes horror fiction, and I abhor horror fiction—in books, films, on television, or anywhere else, for that matter. Although The Last Astronaut does fit...
Cover image of "Little Green Men," a novel about where UFOs come from

Wonder where UFOs come from?

A review of Little Green Men, by Christopher Buckley. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Not only does Buckley make me chuckle and wheeze with immoderate glee, but he also solves the mystery of the UFOs!

Cover image of "Private Revolutions,"

How wrenching change in China affects the lives of its average citizens

No major country, with the possible exception of Russia, has undergone such tumultuous change over the past century as has China. The Japanese invasion and occupation (1931-45). Civil war (1927-49). The Chinese Revolution (1949). Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (1958-60). The Cultural Revolution...
Cover image of "The Historical Atlas of World War II," a collection depicting World War II in maps

World War II in full-color maps and photos

When I was very young, World War II was underway. I'd been born six months before Pearl Harbor and thus was three in 1944 when I developed a fascination for the maps on the pages of the newspaper my father read at the dinner table each evening. They showed troop movements in Europe and the paths...
Cover image of "Portrait of a Thief,"

About all that Chinese art that disappeared from museums

Between 2010 and 2015, dozens of items of precious Chinese art and antiquities disappeared from European museums. They were among the estimated ten million artifacts stolen from China during its century of humiliation from the first Opium War (1839–42) through the Japanese invasion of mainland...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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