⭐⭐⭐⭐✨ (4½ stars) Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Readers’ Favorite Mystery & Thriller (2025) Holly Jackson makes a seamless leap from YA powerhouse to adult thriller with Not Quite Dead Yet, and wow — what a hook. Thirty-six hours after a brutal Halloween attack, Jet Mason wakes in a Vermont hospital to devastating news: a bone fragment is pressing against a vital artery, and within a week she’ll suffer a fatal hemorrhage. Surgery offers only a slim chance. So Jet makes a choice that sets this story on fire — she’ll spend her last seven days finding her killer. Jet, the sharp-tongued, restless daughter of one of Woodstock’s wealthiest families, has […]
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Family Secrets and Fresh Danger in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is classic Colleen Coble—fast-paced, layered with secrets, and set against a moody coastal backdrop that almost feels like another character. In Dark of Night, the second installment in the Annie Pederson series, Coble blends suspense, family drama, and a thread of faith into a story that kept me eagerly flipping pages. Annie’s life is already unraveling when a woman appears claiming to be Sarah—the sister abducted at age five twenty-four years ago. The emotional fallout is immediate. Can Annie risk believing her? And what will it mean for her eight-year-old daughter, Kylie, who senses more than Annie wants to admit? Add to that the unexpected return of Jon, Annie’s […]
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An Ordinary Man, an Extraordinary Reckoning—A Powerful New Series Begins
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is the 33rd book I have read by David Baldacci, and I envision reading many more. Nash Falls is a real winner—and the launch of a brand-new series. Walter Nash is a smart, fair, relentlessly hardworking executive at Sybaritic Investments, with a loving wife and daughter and a life that looks polished and secure. That illusion shatters after his estranged father’s funeral, when the FBI pressures him to expose a global money-laundering operation inside his own firm, led by the ruthless Victoria Steers. Nash agrees, even knowing previous informants have died. When his cover is blown, the retaliation is brutal and deeply personal. His world implodes, and the transformation that follows—from […]
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Jimmy Perez Returns in a Haunting Orkney Mystery
In The Killing Stones, Ann Cleeves brings Detective Jimmy Perez back to center stage—older, settled in Orkney, and facing the one case he never wanted: the murder of his best friend. It’s Christmas in the windswept isles when Archie Stout vanishes. Perez takes the ferry to Westray, only to find Archie dead beside an archaeological dig, his skull crushed by a stolen Neolithic story stone. When a second body turns up in an ancient burial chamber, the investigation shifts from personal grief to something far more layered and unsettling. The Orkney setting is richly atmospheric—howling wind, churning seas, and long winter nights that feel almost claustrophobic. The ancient stones and island history give […]
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Ink, Regret, and Redemption: A Life Told in Letters
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Absolutely one of the best books I read in 2025. In The Correspondent, Virginia Evans introduces Sybil Van Antwerp, a 73-year-old retired law clerk whose life is stitched together through letters. Each morning at half past ten, she writes—to family, to old colleagues, to authors she admires like Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry—and to one person from her past whose letter she has never quite managed to send. Through these exchanges, we see a woman who prefers the safety of the written word to the unpredictability of conversation. Sybil assumes her orderly world will continue as it always has. She has been many things—mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, respected legal mind—and she wears those roles with […]
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A Quiet, Haunting Story of Loss and Longing
3.5 stars rounded up to 4 In July 1962, a Mi’kmaq family travels from Nova Scotia to Maine for the blueberry harvest. Before the summer ends, their four-year-old daughter vanishes. That single, devastating moment shapes the next fifty years. One family mourns in silence, clinging to faith and memory. In another household, a girl named Norma grows up troubled by vivid dreams that feel less like imagination and more like buried truth. Amanda Peters—of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry and winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose—writes with restraint and empathy. She explores loss, grief, and hope, but also the invisible tether that binds families together even when […]
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A Beautiful Idea That Never Quite Comes Together
⭐⭐⭐ After loving Black Cake, I went into Good Dirt with high hopes, which may be why this one felt like such a letdown. Charmaine Wilkerson aims for another sweeping family story, but this time the pieces never fully click. The novel follows Ebby Freeman, whose childhood trauma and family history are tied to the loss of a stoneware jar passed down through generations. On paper, that heirloom should carry deep meaning, yet I kept wondering why anyone would want it in the first place and why it held such enormous value. Instead of anchoring the story, the jar often left me scratching my head. Wilkerson raises intriguing questions about legacy, race, and […]
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When Your Ex Is Your Handler, Nothing Goes According to Plan
⭐⭐⭐⭐✨ (4.5 stars) The Handler is a sharp, high-octane spy thriller with a killer hook: a disgraced former CIA operative forced back into the field—with his ex-wife as his handler. That alone is enough to grab your attention, but Woodward delivers far more than a clever premise. Meredith Morris-Dale is a talented CIA case officer whose career hangs by a thread after a mission goes sideways. Instead of being shown the door, she’s handed an impossible assignment. A long-embedded CIA mole inside Iran’s uranium enrichment program wants out, and the only person he’ll trust is Meredith’s ex-husband, John Dale. Fired, sidelined, and bitter, John is the last person she wants to […]
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A Sequel That Leaves New Readers Behind
This novel makes one thing clear pretty quickly: it was written with prior knowledge in mind. Having never read The Woman in Cabin 10, I often felt unmoored, as if I’d walked into the second half of a conversation and was expected to keep up. Key relationships and emotional stakes are taken for granted instead of built on the page, which makes it hard to fully invest. The setup should work. Travel journalist Lo Blacklock, sidelined by motherhood and a changing media landscape, jumps at the chance to attend the opening of a luxurious Swiss hotel on Lake Geneva. The owner is a reclusive billionaire, the setting is glamorous, and a […]
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The Neighbors Look Nice. They’re Not.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Other People’s Houses turned out to be a great way to stumble into a series. This was my first time reading a DC Morgan novel, and I’m officially in—now I want to read the rest. Set in a glossy UK suburb where everyone appears successful, the story peels back the carefully curated lives of neighbors who are desperate to keep up appearances. When a wealthy couple is murdered in their pristine home, the investigation exposes tangled relationships, financial secrets, and resentments that have been quietly festering for years. Mackintosh does a nice job juggling multiple perspectives, keeping you guessing about who’s lying, who’s hiding something, and who’s capable of […]
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