I thought Kim Hays’s list of Ten Favorite Books Read in 2025 would be the last Friday post from readers. It seems as if I somehow missed Lindy’s list. She resent it yesterday, so we’ll have hers to enjoy next Friday. In the meantime, I’m grateful to Kim for taking time from her writing schedule and daily life to put together this list. Thank you, Kim!

Kim Hays’s Ten Favorite Books in 2025

A year ago, writing about my 2024 favorites, I listed four mystery writers whose series I had recently discovered and whose books I was determined to read throughout the year until I was caught up with their output. These were Ann Cleeves’s police procedurals with Vera Stanhope, Mick Herron’s Slough House series, Peter Grainger’s books about DC Smith and Chris Waters, and Val McDermid’s cold cases featuring Karen Pirie. I finished these four series in 2025 as planned and am now waiting for the authors’ next books. Two of their latest are on my best-of-the-year list.

The Late Lord Thorpe (2024) by Peter Grainger

Now that he is retired, former policeman DC Smith occasionally works on a case for a private detective agency. Thus, he is hired to look into the supposedly accidental death of Freddie, Lord Thorpe, by his older sister. It doesn’t take long for Smith to begin to suspect that the last people to see Freddie alive are lying to him.  I strongly recommend listening to this book rather than reading it, since Gildart Jackson, a great performer, narrates it.

Silent Bones (2025) by Val McDermid

An investigative journalist who was believed to have left the UK after brutally murdering his pregnant girlfriend turns up as a corpse following a landslide on a highway. This is one of two cold cases Karen Pirie investigates in this excellent book. Watching Pirie encourage and manage her two assistants is fun, and the team’s pursuit of the backgrounds of the two men whose deaths they’re researching is fascinating. This is the eighth book in a great series.

The Hallmarked Man (2025) by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J. K. Rowling)

This eighth book in the Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott series, which started with The Cuckoo’s Calling, can be read as a standalone. But then the reader will miss the slow construction of the will-they-won’t-they? relationship between the private detectives that has been going on since they met. This investigation requires Corm and Robin to identify a dismembered body discovered in a silver vault. The dead man could be one of several people, so the detectives try to track down each missing man to figure out who is still unaccounted for. The plot is complex and interwoven, but (as always) Rowling makes everything come clear at the end.

The Proving Ground (2025) by Michael Connelly

Yet another eighth book, this time in Connelly’s series featuring Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer. No longer defending criminals, in this novel, Haller files a lawsuit against a company whose newest chatbot encouraged a sixteen-year-old boy to kill the girl who broke up with him, and he did it.

The Tainted Cup (2024) by Robert Jackson Bennett

This book, the first in a series of at least three (so far), is a mystery—but it’s set in a magical world. The hero, Dinios Kol, is a young man with an inquiring mind and the gift of perfect recall, usually triggered by smell. He’s been assigned as the new assistant to a very eccentric detective, Ana Dolabra, in an empire full of political intrigue. Dolabra rarely leaves her room, so Dinios does all her investigating, starting with trying to understand how and why a high Imperial officer was murdered in his bath by a plant growing up through his body.

Fourth Wing (2023) by Rebecca Yarros, the first book in The Empyrean series

More political intrigue and magic in this book, plus a school that prepares competing youngsters to bond with dragons (if the dragons choose them) and train as dragon riders, who then become soldiers in an ongoing border war. The heroine, Violet Sorrengail, is small and physically weak and would rather be a scholar than a dragon rider, but her mother commands her to compete. Then there are Violet’s dangerous enemies among the rival students at the school, and her attraction to the charismatic son of an executed rebel leader. The result is a book with a brave, appealing heroine that I found too exciting to put down, even though I was skeptical when I started it.

The Hymn to Dionysus (2025) by Natasha Pulley

Pulley is the author of one of my 2024 favorites, The Mars House, a science fiction novel, while this book is a work of ancient history and a fantasy. It takes place soon after the Trojan War in Thebes, a sternly run city-state that demands extreme self-control from its citizens, particularly its soldiers. The hero is an officer named Phaidros, who has spent his life believing that his honor rests on obedience to his commanding officers and his queen, although many of the violent acts he was ordered to commit have left him traumatized. Then Dionysus, the god of revelry, madness, and chaos, appears in Thebes, and its people forget about discipline. Expecting Dionysus to kill him, Phaidros slowly realizes the god is healing him, and he comes to love him.

The Listeners (2025) by Maggie Stiefvater

This is a historical novel set at a magnificent West Virginia hotel during the Second World War. The hotel’s manager, June Hudson, who has been trained by its owner since childhood to provide luxury for guests, is forced by the State Department to house Axis diplomats as part of an attempt to exchange them for their Allied equivalents. June has to push her reluctant staff to provide the same excellent service to the nation’s enemies as they do to regular guests. She also has to deal with FBI agents at the hotel spying on the diplomats, one of whom is a man June knew when they were children in a poor Appalachian town. This book’s magic is found in the hotel’s healing (or sometimes threatening) natural springs, which can only be controlled by June.

Boy (2025) by Nicole Galland

Sander and Joan have been close friends since childhood in Elizabethan London. Now a teenager, Sander is a very successful apprentice in the company of actors Shakespeare writes for. The audience loves Sander’s portrayals of young women like Juliet and Rosalind, and his success gains him invitations to the homes, dinner tables, and beds of the nobility. But he is physically outgrowing his female roles and terrified of what will become of his career when he must hand over the work to younger boys. While Sander dresses as a woman for his job, Joan, a budding botanist, apothecary, and natural scientist, is forced to dress as a boy to gain access to the knowledge she craves, especially from the scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon. The lives of these two complex and delightful young people become intertwined with the Earl of Essex’s rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I.

Small Pleasures (2021) by Clare Chambers

This is a quiet, beautifully written, and moving novel set in a 1950s suburb near London. An unmarried woman in her late thirties, Jean Swinney lives with her selfish, demanding mother and works at the local newspaper, where she’s permitted to write about recipes and other unimportant things. Then her editor asks her to investigate the claim of a local woman that her daughter was the product of a virgin birth. As Jean gets to know the young mother, her now ten-year-old daughter, and her older husband, and researches her story, we readers get to know Jean, with her intelligence, dry humor, and half-suppressed loneliness. She is an unforgettable character in an odd and memorable story.

I can’t resist adding an eleventh book to this list. I hope no one minds a little self-promotion!

Splintered Justice (2025) by Kim Hays

This year, I published the fourth book in my series of police procedurals with detectives Linder and Donatelli, following Pesticide, Sons and Brothers, and A Fondness for Truth. I recommend it for its engaging characters, and BookLife Reviews praises it for its “richly layered suspense,…twists that make logical sense and…deep humanity.” In this mystery, Giuliana Linder investigates a murder that might turn out to be a suicide, while Renzo Donatelli pursues a cold case, a suicide that he thinks could be a murder.

Thank you, Kim. And, I don’t blame you for adding that eleventh book. Of course, Splintered Justice should be one of your favorite books of 2025! A couple of us mentioned yesterday that we can’t imagine what it would be like to open a box with a book we had written in it, and then hold it in our hands. Good for you for the work you put in to do that!