My Favorite Books Published in 2025

 

My Favorite Books Published in 2025   With the end of 2025 dangling on the horizon, it is time to look at the best of the best of all the terrific mystery fiction published during the year. My survey of the genre, of course, is limited to what I read with my own eyes. And truthfully my reading faltered not long after mid-year for a couple reasons I’ve explained in earlier posts. So this is a favorites list rather than a best list. And I tell you, I read some dandy tales in 2025. My only regret: I wish I had read more! So… without anymore wrangling, here are my five favorite mystery books published in 2025. The list is ordered by publication date.
THE MAILMAN – Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Mysterious Press / Jan. 28). This first installment in a new series by the author of the Andy Hayes, P.I. books, is a full-throttled thriller with action, violence, and plotting so good it is a shame it had to end. In my review I wrote: “The Mailman is a nail-biting escapist thriller with twists and whirls and everything else the genre promises. It’s damn fun, too.”   Read the review here.
GALWAY’S EDGE – Ken Bruen (Mysterious Press / Mar. 4). Bruen’s final novel, and the eighteenth entry in his Jack Taylor series, is a moody gash of humanity—the beauty and ugliness are rendered with an expert hand and a melancholy sort of acceptance. As I wrote in my review: “Galway’s Edge is, as is Ken Bruen, the real deal—interesting, thought-provoking, and in equal parts ugly and redemptive.” Ken Bruen died on March 29, a few weeks after Galway’s Edge was released in the U.S. His voice will be sorely missed, but his work will resonate for decades more.   Read the review here.
SKIN AND BONES – Paul Doiron (Minotaur / May 13). This collection of eight tales is an entertaining foray into the world of Doiron’s series character, Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch. Most are narrated by Bowditch, but a few are told from the perspective of Bowditch’s mentor, Charley Stevens. In my review I wrote: “Many of the stories are closer to novelette than short story length, which allows Doiron the room to paint his characters with a rich hue and his rural Maine setting with vivid color. Even better, he does all this without an unnecessary word or losing the mystery for the trees.” In a word, Skin and Bones is terrific!   Read the review here.
MARGUERITE BY THE LAKE – Mary Dixie Carter (Minotaur / May 20). This psychological thriller is a suspenseful novel in the mold of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic masterpiece, Rebecca. But it is more than simply an homage: it is original, clever, and spell-binding. As I wrote in my review: “[The] unreliable narration—made so by her own paranoia and guilt—is taut with suspense and infused with a teetering madness that makes it both terrifying and fascinating…. Marguerite by the Lake is a splendid and inventive thriller, and it is hands down the best book I’ve read so far this year.” And it still just may be my favorite book from 2025.   Read the review here.
PHOTOGRAPH – Brian Freeman (Blackstone / Oct. 7). Freeman is a master at weaving the supernatural into the mainstream thriller form, and Photograph—which features a Daytona Beach P.I., Shannon Wells—is no exception. As I wrote in my review: “The action is lively: there are gunfights, tightly ratcheted tension, and surprise after twisty surprise. While the concept is big and (some might say) over-the-top, Freeman’s clever plotting, his attention to detail, and his likable heroine smooth Photograph into a nail-biting, exciting, and caffeinated literary treat.”   Read the review here.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Ceylon Sapphires, by Mailan Doquang (Mysterious Press / June 3); and a special shout-out for two novelettes—“BAE-I” and “Room E-36”—written by Douglas Corleone.

Booked (and Printed): August 2025

 

Booked (and Printed) August 2025   August was a better reading month than it should have been. Although its four books—one non-fiction and three fiction—and two novelettes were far from a big month. This is because I tend to have late summer reading slumps as I catch up on everything I missed doing earlier in the season. This year I had a couple other complications, too. I started a new job and—well, my damned eyes kept me from the page again. I have a diagnosis, which I’ll keep to myself for now, and a follow up appointment in a few weeks. My fingers and toes are crossed that I’ll get some good news when it happens. While my reading totals were higher than I figured, my reviewing here at the blog was abysmal. In fact, the only review I wrote was for the two novelettes, “BAE-I” and “ROOM E-36,” by Douglas Corleone. These two dark tech scifi tales are the beginning of a series of eleven stories in Corleone’s Ghost Signal: Dark Frequencies. And if the first two are any indication, this is a series to watch. Read my detailed review here. The month started with Max Allan Collins’s shrug-inducing, THE DARK CITY (1987), which is the first in his four book Elliot Ness series. Set in Cleveland, Ohio, after Ness takes the job of Cleveland’s safety director, The Dark City is about an incorruptible cop on a mission to clean-up a vice-ridden police department. The plotting and characters felt like they tumbled out of a 1930s pulp magazine—which is cool—but by the halfway point it had grown rather dull and I found myself yearning for something more interesting. If you’ve never tried Collins, check out his Nathan Heller books. Interestingly, Heller makes a cameo as an incorruptible private eye in The Dark City.

The something more interesting came in the form of Brian Freeman’s INFINITE (2021). This thriller, which is seeded with elements of science fiction, is a breakneck antidote for boredom. Dylan Moran’s life started in the muck—as a boy Dylan watched his father kill his mother before killing himself. And his life has been hobbled by the trauma of that night ever since. Then when Dylan loses his wife, Carly Chance, in a car crash, Dylan sees a familiar man watching it all. A man that could have saved Carly if he'd tried. Infinite is a shocking and an almost surreal—without acting or reading surreal—thriller. It’s a journey into a world of what ifs and what-could-have-beens. The scifi elements, if you haven’t guessed already, are centered around the idea of alternate universes and at least one man’s ability to navigate from one to another. And boy is it fun. My lone foray into fact came with the young adult title, GEORGE WASHINGTON, SPYMASTER, by Thomas B. Allen (2004). This look at the espionage business of the Revolutionary War—which included cyphers, planting false information, stealing correspondence, and running spies throughout the colonies—is informative, fun, and (dare I say) even entertaining. I liked it so much it wouldn’t surprise me if I read it again sometime. August ended with Hank Phillipi Ryan’s psychological thriller, ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS—which is scheduled for release Sep. 9, 2025. Three years ago Tessa Calloway started a national online movement, #MomsWith Dreams, when she livestreamed quitting her job. Since then Tessa has spent more time with her family—husband Henry and their two children Linny and Zack—and written a bestselling novel with an indomitable protagonist named Annabelle Brown. Readers love Annabelle and Tessa, and while on a weeks-long book tour, Tessa, finds this new-found fame gratifying but as the days and events pile up the attention becomes cloying and claustrophobic. Even worse, Tessa believes someone is trying to unveil her dirty little secret: “The one her mother had warned would ruin her.” All This Could Be Yours is a solid thriller with an attitude that is all Hank Phillippi Ryan. Tessa is a complicated and likable character with real world fears, which all of us can relate to. The pacing, especially in the first third of the novel, is a touch slow but Tessa’s likability keeps the narrative interesting. Once the action begins—when the blackmail plot is revealed—all the early flaws are quickly forgotten. And that final reveal is a doozy. My favorite book of August? I’m going with George Washington, Spymaster. Fin— Now on to next month…

Review: "BAE-I" and "Room E-36" by Douglas Corleone

 

Ghost Signal: Dark Frequencies BAE-I and Room E-36 by Douglas Corleone Ghost Signal Press, 2025     One of my recent reading discoveries and new favorites, Douglas Corleone, has written a pair of novelettes—BAE-I and Room E-36—in a new series of dark technology sci-fi tales that read like a television anthology series. Both are standalone stories, but they are thematically linked and have disturbingly believable near-future settings. Their shared theme: artificial intelligence is coming for us. The first, BAE-I, which was released in May, is about a concerned mother, LynAnn Duft, and her adult son, Howie. The place: LynAnn’s home in “a small Missouri town forgotten by time.” Howie resides in the basement with his computer, no friends, and no hope of ever meeting that right girl. But everything changes when LynAnn responds to a television ad for a company called Bae-i. A company that will— I’ll let you discover exactly what Bae-i does because it’ll be more fun that way. The other, Room E-36, which was released in June, finds Jack Alden, a travel writer carrying a lifetime of disappointment and demons, wrapping up an assignment in Waikiki. His article is due in two days and Jack knows the best place to write it is on-island. So when an invitation for a free room at a new resort called Echo at Ko Olina—on Oahu’s leeward side—reaches Jack, he grabs it. The hotel is unique because it is fully autonomous; which means it is operated by artificial intelligence without the aid of human employees. A set-up that makes Jack cringe, but… he goes anyway. Because what could possibly go wrong?

These novelettes are scary, thought-provoking, and entertaining as hell. A trifecta of sorts for any reader with a hankering for a good and satisfying tale. Their lengths—somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 words—along with Corleone’s cinematic prose, make them as much fun to read as a television series like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror are to watch. As usual for Corleone, the settings are vivid and compelling; adding both atmosphere and tension to the narrative. Howie’s basement lair is confining and dark, while the Echo at Ko Olina is obscenely antiseptic. But the real punch is the almost noir-like downfall of the primary characters as they make one bad decision after another. Do yourself a favor and read BAE-I and Room E-36 because we all need a good reality-based scare from time to time.

You can read BAE-I and Room E-36 on Kindle—each is a mere 99-cents or included with you Kindle Unlimited subscription. Click here to go to the Ghost Signal: Dark Frequencies page at Amazon.

Booked (and Printed): July 2025

 

Booked (and Printed) July 2025     July is fireworks, apple pie, heat, humidity, fireflies, swimming, long but shortening days, and quite honestly both the best and worst of summer. The worst (of course) is the heat and humidity. The best is…well, for me, the swimming. I won’t bore you with the heat since I’m sure you have your own awful version, but the best of our summer? I’ll share some of that. We’ve been swimming in the lakes around our home: Lake Bomoseen, Lake St. Catherine, and Emerald Lake. We saw snapping turtles in Bomoseen, sat in a frigid spring at St. Catherine (every time we go), and got caught in an epic rainstorm at Emerald. A rainstorm that almost drowned us; or at least made us really, really wet. As for reading? July’s numbers were better than the prior month’s but it was far from my best with five novels and two short stories. The lackluster numbers are due to my aching eyes, but I kept the course, followed my doctor’s advice and pushed forward anyway. So—with that, I’ll stop complaining. Of the five novels I completed, three were released in 2025: DEATH OF AN EX, by Delia Pitts, LENGTH OF DAYS, by Lynn Kostoff, and Falls to Pieces, by Douglas Corleone. All three were enjoyable and I wrote detailed reviews of the first two here and here. Okay, so my review of Length of Days hasn’t hit yet. But it will soon. As for FALLS TO PIECES—it is something different from the talented and reliable Corleone’s usual fare since it fits nicely into the psychological thriller category. His other work tends toward straight thrillers, crime, and mystery. Kati Dawes and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Zoe, are hiding from Kati’s estranged husband, Jeremy, in the tropical paradise of Maui. Their protected world is shattered when Kati’s fiancé, Eddie, disappears while the couple are hiking. Kati tells law enforcement she last saw Eddie talking on his cell phone, waving for her to go on ahead of him. Of course, Kati is the prime suspect in Eddie’s disappearance and she doesn’t do much to help her cause. Her story is scattered and inconsistent and it doesn’t always line up with the evidence at the scene. And this inconsistency spreads to the reader since Kati is the primary narrator and she is oh so wonderfully unreliable. Things get worse when Eddie’s disappearance hits the national news—and images of Kati are broadcast that bring her ex, Jeremy, scrambling to the island. Falls to Pieces is good fun. The Maui setting is marvelous enough that one can almost smell the trees and earth, and taste the ocean air. The action is swift as it moves around Maui with an almost breathless fervor. The final twist is surprising, as are those preceding it, but I found myself wishing there had been a few more clues to prepare me for that last reveal. With that said, I liked Falls to Pieces and hope to see more fiction like this from Douglas Corleone.

The two “vintage” books I read in July are: What the Dead Leave Behind, by David Housewright (2017), and FRONT SIGHT, by Stephen Hunter (2024). Front Sight is a collection of three Swagger novellas—one each starring Bob Lee, Earl, and Charles (Bob Lee’s grandad). A collection I liked, and one I reviewed here. WHAT THE DEAD LEAVE BEHIND is David Housewright’s fourteenth Rushmore McKenzie and I really dug it. McKenzie is a former St. Paul, Minnesota cop, turned millionaire that does “favors” for friends. Erica, the daughter of McKenzie’s longtime girlfriend Nina Truhler, asks McKenzie to help her college friend, Malcolm Harris, find out who murdered his father, Frank Harris, a year earlier. The police case has gone cold and it seems no one, even Malcolm’s mother and Frank’s widow, cares if the crime is ever solved. McKenzie is hesitant to get involved, but he can’t say no to Erica, and what he finds are another murder that seems to be connected to Frank’s and an array of suspects and motives. What the Dead Leave Behind is a solid mystery—the plotting is tight, the clues are rampant, and the suspense builds with every page. There is Housewright’s usual brilliant Twin Cities (and beyond) setting, too. But it is McKenzie’s witty tongue and his tough guy style that give What the Dead Leave Behind that all too rare shimmer. As for my paltry list of short stories: Both came from the October 1983 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I won’t say anything about the first, “HOW’S YOUR MOTHER?,” by the always reliable Simon Brett, since you can read my full review here. The other, “LOCKED DOORS,” by Lilly Carlson, appeared in EQMM’s Department of “First Stories.” I had never read anything by its author and my internet searches failed to uncover anything else by (or about) her—do any of you know anything about Ms. Carlson?—but I liked “Locked Doors” a bunch. A psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator, a writer of course, with a couple kids, a dog, and what may or may not be an overactive imagination. This one is worth looking up if you’re of a mind. The only book I started and failed to finish was Elise Hart Kipness’s latest release, CLOSE CALL (2025)—which is slated for release on August 19. This third in the Kate Green mystery series is set at the U.S. Open tennis grand slam championship tournament in Flushing Meadows, New York. But it could have been set anywhere since little of the tournament filters into the story until late in the day. At its center, a world class and mostly despised female tennis champion is kidnapped, and Kate (a television sports newscaster) and her father, an NYPD detective, are the only hope of getting her back alive. I made it more than 70-percent of the way through but it failed to pique my interest from the first sentence to the last one I read. There is repetition, not much character development, and the U.S. Open setting could have been so much better. But that’s just me… Okay, as my mom always taught me, exit on something positive. My favorite book of the month? What the Dead Leave Behind. Just thinking about it makes me want to dip into  McKenzie’s next adventure, which if memory serves is Like to Die (2018). Fin— Now on to next month…

Review: "Night on Fire" by Douglas Corleone

 

Night on Fire by Douglas Corleone Minotaur Books, 2011     Douglas Corleone’s second Kevin Corvelli mystery, Night on Fire, is a snappy and sharp legal thriller with personality—in the form of the almost debauched and always fun Corvelli. While chatting-up a cougar in his favorite outdoor beach bar, in Ko Olina on Oahu, Corvelli is among the many witnesses of a nasty and drunken fight between newlyweds. Corvelli’s only thoughts about the dust-up are: 1) too bad he doesn’t do divorces; and 2) just how sexy the bride is. With that, Kevin follows his libido into the cougar’s room in the Liholiho Tower of the Kupulupulu Beach Resort where the fight would have been forgotten, except later that night the Liholiho catches fire, killing eleven—including the sparring groom—and very nearly gets Kevin, his cougar, and a four-year-old boy named Josh Leffler that Corvelli befriended at the hallway vending machine. It takes investigators only a few hours to rule the fire as arson and a few more to finger the angry bride, Erin Simms, as their prime suspect. Of course, Corvelli takes Erin’s case, pisses off his law partner, Jake Harper, and makes one or two ethically dubious choices while facing down a prosecutor that seems to have a personal grudge against him. Night on Fire is a great summertime read—from its vivid Hawaii setting to Kevin Corvelli’s questionable personal behavior; which Corleone obviously had fun writing. Corvelli is a borderline alcoholic, a confirmed skirt chaser, but a damn good lawyer and something of an okay guy once you scrape the gunk away. There is a bit of fish-out-of-water subplot here, too, as Corvelli takes a big brother-like interest in the young Josh Leffler. The mystery is nicely developed with a handful of well-placed clues and the courtroom scenes are excellent. The climactic twist ending is on the far side of wild, but it didn’t bother me a whit since the journey there was so damn fun. Night on Fire is a must read for anyone with a hankering for entertainment and a desire to get away this summer without leaving home.

Night on Fire appears to be out-of-print (for some sick reason), but you can check out the original hardcover here at Amazon.

Booked (and Printed): March 2025

 

Booked (and Printed) March 2025   Ah, Spring is in the air—wait, it’s snowing? Right now? March’s weather was topsy-turvy with a handful of warm days sprinkled like so many chocolate chips in a mostly chilly month. It was also a month that found my review writing for the blog woefully inadequate to my reading. Of the seven books and two shorts I read during March, I only wrote three reviews—one is for SKIN AND BONES AND OTHER MIKE BOWDITCH STORIES, by Paul Doiron, scheduled for release on May 13. In a phrase, Skin and Bones is great, but you’ll have to wait until May 12, a Monday, to read what I really think about it. Another is for the forthcoming true crime title, THE CLEVELAND JOHN DOE CASE, by Thibault Raisse, about a 2003 suicide that turned into an enigma when it was discovered the dead man had lived under an alias for decades. Scheduled for a Tax Day release, April 15, you’ll find my review on this same bandwidth on Monday, April 14. The final review, and the only one to actually appear at the blog in March, was for Henry Slesar’s terrific mystery story, “THE TIN MAN,” which appeared in the June 1984 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—read the review here. Now for the other seven titles I neglected to mention even though, for the most part, they were damn good. PALMS, PARADISE, POISON, by John Keyse-Walker (2021), is the third (of four) Constable Teddy Creque mysteries. Set on the tiny Caribbean Island of Anegada, which is part of the Royal Virgin Islands, Teddy is battening down for an approaching hurricane when he receives a message from headquarters about an escaped prisoner named Marianna Orro, or as she calls herself, Queen Ya-Ya. A practitioner of Santeria, Queen Ya-Ya is not only scary, but she is dangerous, too. Teddy is sure Ya-Ya will run for a bigger island, but of course, she ends up on Anegada as the first ever prisoner in the island’s one cell jail. At least until she engineers an escape with what appears to the witnesses as mind control. Teddy chases Ya-Ya from Anegada to rural Cuba. Palms, Paradise, Poison, is as good as Keyse-Walker’s first two Teddy Creque novels; which is saying something because those earlier books were marvelous. The setting, while shifting from Anegada to Cuba, is as vibrant as ever—I could almost feel the sand between my toes—and makes for a nice respite from these cold Northeastern winters. The Santeria infused in the narrative made for some interesting reading, but the real treat is kicking around with Teddy for a few hours.

One of my reading goals for 2025 was to add more variety to my leisure reading. With that purpose in mind, I read Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s WW2 young adult novel, THE WAR BELOW (2014). The teenage Luka, a Ukrainian, escaped from a Nazi labor camp and is torn between returning to the camp for his friend Lida or making his way across the Carpathian Mountains to Kyiv where, he hopes, his father will still be alive. Going back to the camp for Lida is hopeless since it will put him back in the hands of the Nazis and so he decides his only choice is to find his father. Luka makes scant progress moving through the mountains in winter, but he does make a new friend and stumbles upon the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighting the Nazis and then the Soviets as they push in from the east. There are some interesting discussions about Ukraine’s abuse by both the Soviets (both pre- and post-war) and the Nazis, but it was obviously written for younger teenagers because it lacked much of the nastiness of the conflict. The War Below is a good book for your teenage readers, but be ready to help them put it in context with the happenings of the 1930s and 1940s, both Nazi and Communist, because the narrative never goes much beyond Luka’s own story. My quasi-reading challenge with Minotaur Books led me to ONE MAN’S PARADISE, by Douglas Corleone (2010). Paradise won the St. Martin’s Press/MWA First Crime Novel Award and while it is obviously a first novel—the pacing isn’t perfect and the protagonist makes more than a couple wildly immature decisions—it is also a readable distraction. Kevin Corvelli, a New York criminal lawyer, comes to Honolulu to make a fresh start after failing to win an acquittal for an innocent client that was murdered in prison. Covelli vowed he would never work a felony case again, but when his office landlord, also a lawyer, drops a high-dollar murder case in his lap, all Corvelli sees are the dollars. The case is murky with at least three solid suspects, all with motive and opportunity, but what Kevin can’t see shapes the court case. Paradise’s setting is sharp and while the climactic ending is frayed with a where did that come from? feeling, it’s a solid debut and I’ll likely read more of Corleone’s work. I came to Joyce Carol Oates’s marvelous writing late in the game, back in 2015 when I took over Mystery Scene’s “Short and Sweet: Short Stories Considered” column and started seeing her stories in magazines and collections. But since then, I’ve been an advocate for Oates’s often surreal and always meaningful tales. Her 1992 novel, BLACK WATER, is a brilliant fictional retelling of the Chappaquiddick Incident where Senator Ted Kennedy crashed his car into a pond and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. The names have been changed—Kopechne is “Kelly Kelleher” and Kennedy is, mostly, referred to as “The Senator”—and it is told from the perspective of the drowned woman. The effect of Oates’s evocative prose, the images of Kelleher’s life in flashback form, and the claustrophobic blackness of her drowning are powerful. Everyone should read Black Water because it is a literary powerhouse and it illuminates the feminine experience in America during the second half of the 20th Century. March also saw me return to Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith series, which has become something of a literary comfort food for me. DROPSHOT (1990), the second book in the series, is set on the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten and I enjoyed jumping into Smith’s world as much this time as I had the prior five or six readings I’ve made of Dropshot. Read my old gangster review here. And finally, the other short story I read, “ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD,” by Swedish crime writer, Karin Tidbeck (2018), is a brilliant tale asking if the past ever dies. Four teenagers venture into the woods on a dark Swedish night looking for a mythical supernatural phenomenon, but only two of them return. Years later, the survivors find themselves back at the scene hoping to find something that will relieve their grief and guilt. But as everyone knows, personal tragedy has a long shelf life. Whew. Fin— Now on to next month…