Piling on With Plaudits

BookPage has chimed in with its own “Best Mystery & Suspense of 2025” list, comprising 10 works released over the last year:

• All of Us Murderers, by K.J. Charles (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Flashout, by Alexis Soloski (Flatiron)
• Hot Wax, by M.L. Rio (Simon & Schuster)
• Listen, by Sacha Bronwasser (Penguin)
• Salty, by Kate Myers (HarperVia)
• The Black Wolf, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Man Who Died Seven Times, by Yasuhiko Nishizawa
(Pushkin Vertigo)
• The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective, by Jo Nichols (Minotaur)
• The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie (Putnam)
• The Wolf Tree, by Laura McCluskey (Putnam)

It’s nice to see some unique choices being made here, though a couple of these books managed to miss my radar entirely.

Note, too, that Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne also made the cut as one of BookPage’s “10 Best Books of 2025.”

* * *

Among the New York Public Library’s new “Best Books of 2025” selections are 50 works for adults, four of them pulled straight out of the Crime, Mystery, and Thriller stacks:

• Fair Play, by Louise Hegarty (Harper)
• Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster)
• King of Ashes, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron/Pine & Cedar)
• Vantage Point, by Sara Sligar (MCD)

* * *

Meanwhile, just yesterday Britain’s Historical Writers Association announced the three winners of its 2025 HWA Crown Awards, “celebrating the best in recent historical writing, fiction and non-fiction.” They include the Debut Crown Award recipient: A Poisoner’s Tale, by Cathryn Kemp (Bantam), described as “a gothic and spellbinding historical novel about the first female serial killer.”

Ayo Onatade, chair of the Debut Crown judges (and an editor at Shots), said Kemp’s novel, set in 17th-century Italy, “not only evoked a profound sense of place and intrigue but the geography, local culture, and historical period all intertwined to produce this well-written and inseparable tragedy based on a true crime.”

(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)