A running tally of the books that I have reviewed this year, updated and reranked after each book that I finish. Explore the latest reviews and discover hidden gems with insights from BarlinsBooks, your literary companion for top new releases.

★★☆☆☆ Two young girls try to catch the Yorkshire Ripper in 1979, but their "list of suspicious things" is just a vehicle to clumsily comment on prejudice.

★★★★★ A "tradwife" and Instagram influencer has cultivated a seemingly idyllic life for herself and family, but it's all upended when she wakes up one day in 1805.

★★★★☆ A heist/hostage situation at an elite restaurant is the vehicle for this novel to explore marriage and parenting as much as the heist.

★★★★☆ A short story collection masquerading as a novel, it follows the exploits of a family who consistently find themselves on the fringe of honest society.

★★★★☆ A two-tiered whodunit focused on the murder of a prominent Baton Rouge lawyer and its potential connection to a hit-and-run from a decade prior.

A running tally of the books that I have reviewed this year, updated and reranked after each book that I finish. Explore the latest reviews and discover hidden gems with insights from BarlinsBooks, your literary companion for top new releases.

★★★★★ A small town, a love triangle, a murder, and a trial form the foundation of this twisty, emotional novel set in mid-1900s England.

★★★★★ Edgy, violent, and dark, Cosby's latest sees a successful money manager sucked into working for a sadistic gang in order to save his brother.

★★★★★ Kerr's mature and tightly-plotted debut follows the murder investigation of the founder of a fictitious tech company in San Francisco.

★★☆☆☆ Mostly character study plus social commentary, it follows a fictional female journalist in Japan as she interviews a convicted serial killer.

★★★★☆ As a major storm approaches, a woman living alone in the woods finds a girl hiding in her toolshed, covered in blood and clutching a knife.

★★★★★ The daughter of a convicted serial killer has kept her identity a secret for 20 years, but someone has found out and is determined to expose her.

★★★☆☆ A woman returns to her hometown in South Carolina, only to be confronted with clues that help her unravel her sister's disappearance twenty years prior.

Amazon's Top 100 Books of 2025. How do they compare to Barlin's Books rankings for the year? Where did they get things right, and where did

★★★☆☆ Robert Langdon is back for another romp through an international city—this time, Prague—and a secret about human consciousness that could rock the world.

★★★★★ A woman returns to the elite boarding school she attended after 20+ years to search for answers about the murder of her roommate senior year.

★★★★☆ When a lawyer starts to dig into the murder of his best friend, all signs seem to point to conspiracies involving his own law firm.

★★★★☆ A novel premise gives way to a well-structured mystery in which a young woman must solve her own murder before an aneurysm kills her.

★★★☆☆ A serial killer returns to Portland after almost twenty years to terrorize a local radio host, targeting the one person who saw him and lived.