Best Books of 2025

Hello – I’m back.

I was going to launch into this year with a review of last year and resolutions for 2026. However, since last year was a bad one for a variety of reasons, and this year really hasn’t started well, I’ve decided to skip over the whole ruminating on the year just past and focus instead on the small pleasures in life – namely, books.

As always I keep a running tally on the books I read every year through Goodreads. I fell short of my goal of 60 books in a year – I managed 55. Of those, only three of them earned a five star rating, and I’m listing those below.

Fire and Bones – Kathy Reichs. I’ve been reading this series since the first one was released back in 1997. Kathy Reichs remains one of my favourite authors, and I enjoy all of the books, but more recent releases have been getting more consistently a four-star rating from me. This one, though – the 23rd book in the adventures of forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan – gets a solid five stars.

We Live Here Now – Sarah Pinborough. I know Sarah; we run into each other at conventions on occasion, and I’ve been a fan of her work for years. The last few I’ve read have been psychological thrillers, which often have a supernatural leaning. But this one is very much a ghost story, and it’s a genuinely creepy read. I didn’t want to put it down, and with all the books I read, that really doesn’t happen very often.

Death Under a Little Sky – Stig Abell. This author is a recent discovery for me, and I came across this one by chance, browsing the book shop. The premise sounded intriguing – the tale of a former Metropolitan Police detective, Jake Jackson, escaping a failed marriage and the end of his career by moving into the remote property bequeathed to him by his late Uncle Arthur. The house is very literally in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity, no phone, no internet, and no running water. The house does have, however, wood burning fireplaces and a vast library full of crime fiction. It turns out to be the retreat Jake needs, and as he gets used to his new life getting closer to nature and the peace of being disconnected from the world, the character really grew on me. However, it turns out that you can’t take the urge to detect out of the detective and Jake soon gets involved in investigating a local murder. Engaging characters and some really descriptive writing got me hooked on this series, and I’ve since been catching up with the rest of Jake’s adventures.

For this year I’ve chickened out of an ambitious goal and set the bar at 55, the number of books I managed to read last year, but I’m hoping to exceed that. Although I have no desire to follow Jake’s example and cut myself off completely from the modern world, I do hope to disconnect a bit more often and spend more time in fictional worlds rather than the real one.

And I do hope to blog a bit more often.