Best of 2025

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Best of the year lists are so difficult!  I’ve given myself leeway to divide books into categories – cozy, historical, best all around – giving me a chance to spotlight more great reads.  All of the reviews appear either on this website or over at Deadly Pleasures (or both).  Deadly Pleasures also features my pared down top 10 list.  Here are 30 great reads culled from the 100 or so books I read each year.  My standard is simple – a book that stays with me long after I finish it, great writing, great characters.  There are veterans and newbies here.  Dive in! read more

Jennie Godfrey: The List of Suspicious Things

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This isn’t exactly a mystery but it does have plenty of crime.  Jennie Godfrey creates a 12 year old character as memorable (and perhaps more rooted in reality) than Flavia DeLuce.  Miv, the heroine of the story, lives in 1970’s Yorkshire, with her Dad, her Aunty Jean, and her mother, who doesn’t speak and spends most of her time in her room.  Miv is pretty much left to her own devices but is happy enough hanging out with her best friend, Sharon.

Margaret Thatcher has just been elected and the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper is in full swing.  While Miv and Sharon are someone insulated from the stories about the Ripper, the news coverage is beginning to grow, and it is becoming unavoidable not to know about him.  The boys at her school even play a game called “Ripper chase.” read more

Best of 2025: Reviewer’s Choice

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Our reviewers, Margaret Agnew, Cathy Akers-Jordan, Vicki Kondelik and Carla Schantz, are all extremely discerning readers and all have shared their favorites for the year.  I so appreciate the yearly efforts of these wonderful reviewers, and their top 10 lists should help you find a good read.  Some have comments, some (like Margaret) have merely listed their selections in order.  All the choices have been given lots of thought.  Needless to say, their reviews appear on the website, and you can read more about them on the “Our Reviewers” tab here. read more

Clara McKenna: Murder at Cottonwood Creek

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Stella & Lyndy #7

Murder At Cottonwood Creek Is the seventh book in Clara McKenna’s series set in the early 20th century, about Viscount “Lyndy” Lyndhurst, a British aristocrat, and Stella, his American-born wife, the daughter of a Kentucky horse farmer who was murdered in an earlier book.  It was an arranged marriage at first, but the couple grew to love each other.  A shared love of horses certainly helped.  This book takes place outside the series’ usual setting of the New Forest region of England, as Stella and Lyndy travel to a ranch in Montana, owned by her mother’s second husband, Ned Smith.  There, Lyndy’s father, Lord Atherly, pursues his passion for fossil-hunting, as he works with a paleontologist, Professor Gridley, to search for the fossils of prehistoric horses.  Lyndy, a fan of dime novels, is excited about seeing the “Wild West,” even though he is disappointed that the herds of buffalo have largely died out.  Stella is glad to finally meet her stepfather and twelve-year-old brother.  She has recently settled her father’s estate in Kentucky and brought thoroughbred horses to the ranch. read more

Valerie Wilson Wesley: The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum

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Series Debut

Harriet Stone is named for Harriet Tubman – the legendary Tubman had saved her father from slavery (he referred to her as “the General”). Our Harriet is intrepid and courageous, though she herself may not quite be aware of it.  Set in 1926, she’s has lost most of her family as well as her fiancée to the Spanish flu, and she’s in charge of the orphaned Lovey, who is not quite young enough to be her daughter and not quite old enough to be her sister.  Their relationship teeters between the two designations. read more

Elizabeth Penney: Vows and Villainy

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Cambridge Bookshop #5

In Elizabeth Penny’s fifth addition to her Cambridge Bookshop series, Vows and Villainy, the reader finds Molly Kimball, a librarian who helps her aunt in her bookshop and the local police with their murders in Cambridge, England. Molly uses deductive reasoning and her social prowess to entice others to give her clues and bits of information. She also does not try to solve everything on her own and then turn over the information to the authorities – instead, she keeps the local detectives in the know as she goes, trying her best to be helpful as well as safe. While they might not praise her for her efforts they appreciate and utilize her intel as much as possible, more so now that she has established herself as a credible amateur sleuth. read more

Elly Griffiths: The Frozen People

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Series Debut

I had decided to skip this book because of the time travel element, but what a huge mistake.  A friend and book club member listed it on her favorites of the year list, and since I trust her taste, I dove in.  I should also, of course, have trusted the great Elly Griffiths, who has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary crime fiction, not to mention extraordinary storytelling skills.  She has a way of writing that draws the reader in.  Readers, I was all in with this book. read more

Connie Berry: A Grave Deception

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Kate Hamilton #6

To me this series is an absolute bingeable dream.  If your taste runs to a gentle British police mystery featuring an antiques specialist, these are the books for you.  In the first book in the series (A Dream of Death), 40 something heroine Kate Hamilton, an American antiques dealer, is in the UK to repair her relationship with her dead husband’s sister and she gets more than she bargained for.  In the course of the series she meets her new husband (by book six they are happily married newlyweds).  In each novel, there’s an unusual antiquity or archaeological find that holds the threads of the plot together. read more

Cara Black: Huguette

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I was very eagerly awaiting this book, which marries Cara Black’s interest in Paris and WWII with a great new female central character.  Black has made her name with her Aimée Leduc series featuring a private detective in 1990s Paris.  Her new book takes us back to the war where we discover, along with titular character Huguette, Aimée’s grandfather Claude, founder of the Leduc Detective Agency.  When the book opens, though, Claude is a policeman, or flic, just trying to hold on to his job. read more

Julia Spencer-Fleming: At Midnight Comes the Cry

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Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alsytne #10

Julia Spencer-Fleming has been following the beloved duo of Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne throughout their entire relationship, and At Midnight Comes the Cry finds them at a period of great change. The couple have just had a baby, and are re-shaping their lives around their son. In addition, Russ has resigned as police chief earlier than intended and he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Going from the military to the police force kept his life regimented and task driven, and being a stay-at-home dad isn’t quite the same. read more