The Latest

They grew the country’s vegetables

They grew the country’s vegetables

If you watched the HBO drama Succession, you'll have a sense of what happened to the once-famous Seabrook frozen-food dynasty. Succession features a tyrannical "self-made" founder, hideous corporate crime, cynical right-wing politics, sibling rivalry, backstabbing, and worse....

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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A tense medical thriller from a master of the craft

A tense medical thriller from a master of the craft

If you're fond of reading medical thrillers, you've probably come across the names of the leading practitioners of the craft. Tess Gerritsen, for example, author of The Surgeon. Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain). Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay...

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NONFICTION

They grew the country’s vegetables

They grew the country’s vegetables

If you watched the HBO drama Succession, you'll have a sense of what happened to the once-famous Seabrook frozen-food dynasty. Succession features a tyrannical "self-made" founder, hideous corporate crime, cynical right-wing politics, sibling rivalry, backstabbing, and worse....

read more

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 "Activation Degradation," a novel about biomechanical robots and aliens

Biomechanical robots battle invading aliens

AMS Unit Four wakes fresh from the reconstitution station to the sound of emergency alarms. Aliens are attacking the energy mine in Jovian space that supplies a third of Earth's energy needs. Forced to rush immediately into action, it soon finds itself confronted with a terrible dilemma. One of...
The American Mission is a diplomatic thriller.

A diplomatic thriller set in a country where more died than in the Holocaust

At times it seems that Africa is at war with itself. The list of border conflicts, civil wars, insurrections, and terrorist attacks in recent decades seems endless. They're too numerous to mention, but three stand out for their scope and ferocity: the Rwanda genocide, Darfur, and the unending wars...
Cover image of "Just Mercy," a book about our broken criminal justice system

A searing look at America’s broken criminal justice system

No one who is even marginally aware of the world we live in could possibly fail to understand that America's criminal justice system is broken. Just how badly broken it is comes into sharp focus in a remarkable new book by Bryan Stevenson, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship ("genius...
Cover image of "The Stolen Heart," a Ukrainian detective novel

During the Russian Civil War, crime in Kyiv took no holiday

Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv is no stranger to violence. Today the city's three million residents are subject to random attacks by Russian drones and missiles. But Kyiv was a battleground in World War II. From 1941 to 1943, the capital's population shrank from 930,000 to 70,000 as marauding Nazi...

Another suspenseful crime novel from Jo Nesbo

Spoiler alert: this is not one of the detective novels in Jo Nesbo's celebrated Harry Hole series. But don't beat yourself up. I was fooled, too. In any case, it's a truly suspenseful crime novel. Inspector Hole is, of course, the intuitive alcoholic genius who routinely shows up all his...
Sphere is a literary exercise in human conflict.

Michael Crichton’s literary exercise in human conflict

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes When he died in 2008, Michael Crichton (1942-2008) left behind a literary legacy that had captured the imagination not just of the public but of Hollywood as well. Some of the best-remembered films of recent decades include stories based on Crichton's twenty-six...
Cover image of "Dawn" by Octavia E. Butler, a novel about the human condition

A science fiction novel that illuminates the human condition

At its best, science fiction illuminates the human condition by exploring our emotions and our behavior in a context that violates our sense of reality and challenges us to look more deeply into ourselves. The late Octavia E. Butler reached this peak of insight more often than most in her...
Brain Wave

How would you behave if your IQ suddenly doubled?

Just as history books often tell us more about historians than they do about history, genre fiction can reveal a great deal about its authors and the times during which they write. History books fall into disfavor as new information comes to light, making way for new interpretations of the facts....
Cover image of "Everybody Knows,"

Life and death in the seamy underside of Hollywood

Here's a story about power and the violence that sustains it. Violence erupts on the page in Jordan Harper's thriller, Everybody Knows, from its lede ("Los Angeles burns. Some sicko is torching homeless camps.") to its inevitable conclusion. And the woman at the center of Harper's story, Mae...
Cover image of "George Marshall,"

He guided the allies in World War II and fathered the Marshall Plan

You may recognize the Marshall Plan as one of the most outstanding episodes in our diplomatic history. But you're less likely to be familiar with the man who gave his name to the project. When we think of our greatest heroes in World War II, the name George Marshall doesn't spring to mind. Yet as...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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