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A running ranking of the year's best books


The Beast in the Clouds
★★★★☆ Teddy Roosevelt's sons embark on a quest in 1929 to obtain a specimen of a giant panda, an animal rarely seen and wholly unknown at the time.

Greg Barlin
Sep 54 min read


Not Quite Dead Yet
★★★★☆ 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.

Greg Barlin
Sep 13 min read


Night Watcher
★★★☆☆ 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.

Greg Barlin
Aug 242 min read


Finding Grace
★★★☆☆ A difficult novel to review without spoiling the story, it focuses on a family trying to have another child before a shocking event disrupts everything.

Greg Barlin
Aug 133 min read


The Ghostwriter
★★★★☆ A woman returns home to ghostwrite her estranged father's memoir while trying to unravel if he was responsible for the 50-year-old murder of his siblings.

Greg Barlin
Aug 83 min read


A Marriage at Sea
★★★☆☆ A British couple decide to sail from England to New Zealand in the 1970s, only to be stranded in the middle of the Pacific after a whale destroys their boat.

Greg Barlin
Aug 32 min read


My Friends
★★★★☆ Told mostly via flashbacks about four childhood friends, the novel focuses on resiliency and found family in the face of domestic violence and neglect.

Greg Barlin
Aug 24 min read


One Golden Summer
★★★★★ A photographer spends a summer at a lake house where she meets a cocksure man whose charms threaten their mutual vow of friendship.

Greg Barlin
Jul 313 min read
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