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!

 

Cover image of "Gangster Warlords," a book about drug cartels

The who, what, and why of Latin America’s drug cartels

Americans who take their first trip from country to country in Latin America and the Caribbean are often astounded by the region's diversity. From Argentina, which is more heavily influenced by Italy and Spain than by any country to its north; to the polyglot island-states of the Caribbean; to...
Cover image of "A Purple Place for Dying,"

A murder and a cover-up jump-start this Travis McGee thriller

From 1964 to 1985 a World War II veteran officer and Harvard MBA named John D. MacDonald published a series of 21 remarkable short crime novels centered on a "Florida beach bum" named Travis McGee. Travis, of course, was MacDonald's alter ego, with an incisive mind, a head for business, and a...
The Historians

A spellbinding WWII thriller set in neutral Sweden

What most of us in the English-speaking world know about Scandinavia's role in World War II is largely limited to tales of the Nazi invasions of Norway and Denmark. Less well remembered are the events that unfolded in neutral Sweden, the region's most populous country. And award-winning Swedish...
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 "Extraordinary Powers," a standout among espionage thrillers

A standout among espionage thrillers from Joseph Finder

Ben Ellison is a Boston patent lawyer who is a former CIA agent who had lost his first wife to an explosion engineered by the KGB. He possesses an eidetic memory and, after an unusually powerful MRI, the ability to read minds -- and, yes, through his second wife, he is now the son-in-law of the...
Cover image of "Last Seen in Lapaz," a novel about a missing-persons case in Ghana

A missing woman, a murder, and a young PI

Kwei Quartey is a retired physician with the mind and eye of an anthropologist. In two series of detective novels set in his native Ghana, he portrays crime investigations against the backdrop of Ghana's rich ancient culture and its often dysfunctional society. Revealing entrenched superstitions...
Transmission is a childish sci-fi novel.

A YA novel about first contact that’s . . . well, childish

Some of the very best science fiction novels I've read have been marketed for young adults. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with a 13-or 14-year-old protagonist. You know it's unlikely there'll be any smoldering sex scenes or extravagant use of profanity. But otherwise there's no...
The Unwanted raises the question, did fdr betray the jews?

Did FDR betray the Jews of Europe?

Did FDR betray the Jews of Europe? Did he turn a blind eye toward the Nazi "Final Solution" by preventing thousands of Jewish refugees from entering the United States? Clearly, there is ample evidence that President Roosevelt resisted pressure to admit German Jews fleeing from the Nazis, and on...
Ageless

An aging reviewer tackles a book about aging

If you're considering this book in hopes of finding some magical supplement or salve to add ten years to your life, forget it. The author is a PhD physicist turned computational biologist—a serious scientist. In Ageless, he relates the latest findings about the emergence of a new field called...
Walking Shadows is the 25th Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus novel.

Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus are all grown up in Faye Kellerman’s latest

One of the pleasures of reading novels in a long-running series is the opportunity to watch the protagonists' growth. Faye Kellerman launched the Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series in 1986 with the publication of The Ritual Bath. Now, more than thirty years later, comes Walking Shadows, the...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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