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Were British double agents the key to the Normandy invasion?

Were British double agents the key to the Normandy invasion?

Americans' views of the Second World War have been dominated by films, books, and television specials about the role that U.S. troops played in the fighting. Even today, more than three-quarters of a century after the war ended, we tend to believe that it was our ingenuity and...

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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!

 

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 "At Risk" by Dame Stella Rimington

Dame Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle series of top-notch espionage novels

Ex-spooks with a modicum of writing ability sometimes turn to writing spy thrillers once they've left the world of espionage. Rarely, though, do we see fictional treatments of the game come from anyone who retired at the very top of the game. Dame Stella Rimington is one of what must be only a...
Faithful Place by Tana French

From Tana French, a brilliant and satisfying novel of suspense

Faithful Place works on every level: as a suspenseful detective novel, as a psychological study of a horribly dysfunctional family, as a portrait of class relations in contemporary Ireland, and as an excursion into working-class Irish dialect.

Cover image of "Deadwood,"

Debunking the myths of the Wild West

For three seasons early in this century, HBO aired Deadwood, which won more than two dozen Emmy Awards. The series starred Timothy Olyphant as businessman and lawman Seth Bullock and Ian McShane as Al Swearengen, the violent criminal proprietor of a saloon and brothel. Other leading characters...
Cover image of "Notorious Nineteen," a book by Janet Evanovich

Enough already! An open letter to Janet Evanovich

A review of Notorious Nineteen, by Janet Evanovich. @@@ (3 out of 5). The 19th in the series of humorous novels featuring Stephanie Plum, the lingerie-buyer turned incompetent bounty hunter.

Cover image of "A Banquet of Consequences" by Elizabeth George, a novel that's more than a whodunit

Elizabeth George’s latest is much more than a whodunit

On a superficial level, A Banquet of Consequences is a simple whodunit. Inspector Thomas Lynley and his brilliant but exasperating sidekick, Sergeant Barbara Havers, must identify the murderer among several suspects. But the novel is anything but superficial. Author Elizabeth George, who earned a...
Cover image of "Spain in Our Hearts," a Spanish Civil War history

The American role in the Spanish Civil War

A few weeks ago I read and reviewed Richard Rhodes' Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made, which was published last year. More recently, Adam Hochschild tackled Spanish Civil War history in a book published this year. It's the book that Rhodes tried and failed to...
Cover image of "Victory Square" by Olen Steinhauer, a novel in his Yalta Boulevard cycle

Olen Steinhauer’s brilliant Yalta Boulevard cycle set in Eastern Europe

In addition to the five novels in his splendid Yalta Boulevard cycle, Olen Steinhauer has authored to date the Milo Weaver trilogy (The Tourist, The Nearest Exit, An American Spy) and three standalone novels. But to my mind the five-book series that begins with The Bridge of Sighs is his best...
Jimmy the Kid is a comic caper novel.

A kidnapping tale from the master of the comic caper novel

In the course of his 75 years, Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) published more than 100 novels and nonfiction books. He's best known for his comic stories about crime capers, especially the fourteen books in the Dortmunder series about (to crib a phrase from Jimmy Breslin) a "gang that couldn't...
The Story of Ain't shows how the rules of grammar are obsolete.

The famous dictionary that threw out the rules of grammar

My mother went ballistic when Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1961. She'd taught English for a time during the Depression. Then, there was a right way and a wrong way to express yourself. Rules were rules—and English teachers knew exactly what they...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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