“Bests” Just Keep Bobbing Up

I’m not going to try to inventory every “best crime and mystery fiction of 2025” list popping out across the media right now (Deadly Pleasures editor George Easter definitely has the edge in that game). But mentioning a few more entries in the field can’t hurt.

Late last week CrimeReads posted its nominations of “20 novels that defined the year for mystery readers.” Now managing editor Molly Odintz has returned with the site’s picks of the 15 “Best Debut Novels of 2025” (at least in the crime, mystery, and thriller arena):

• If the Dead Belong Here, by Carson Faust (Viking)
• The Slip, by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster)
• The Snares, by Rav Grewal-Kök (Random House)
• We Don’t Talk About Carol, by Kristen L. Berry (Bantam)
• Florida Palms, by Joe Pan (Simon & Schuster)
• Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino (Celadon)
• The Museum Detective, by Maha Khan Phillips (Soho Crime)
• Leverage, by Amran Gowani (Atria)
• Julie Chan Is Dead, by Liann Zhang (Atria)
• The Fact Checker, by Austin Kelley (Atlantic Crime)
• Ruth Run, by Elizabeth Kaufman (Penguin)
• Boom Town, by Nic Stone (Simon & Schuster)
• Hollow Spaces, by Victor Suthammanont (Counterpoint)
• History Lessons, by Zoe B. Wallbrook (Soho Crime)
• Fireweed, by Lauren Haddad (Astra House)

Odintz offers a second new “best of” post, which went up earlier today: “The Best Psychological Thrillers of 2025.”

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Robin Agnew, who for many years co-owned (with her husband, Jamie) Aunt Agatha’s Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, still runs a lively crime-fiction blog and contributes reviews to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. Her 15 top choices for 2025 are generally, but not exclusively, drawn from this genre’s cozier side:

• Glory Daze, by Danielle Arceneaux (Pegasus Crime)
• A Death in Diamonds, by S.J. Bennett (Crooked Lane)
• Just Another Dead Author, by Katarina Bivald (Poisoned Pen Press)
• I Died for Beauty, by Amanda Flower (Berkley)
• The List of Suspicious Things, by Jennie Godfrey (Sourcebooks/Landmark)
• The Frozen People, by Elly Griffiths (Pamela Dorman)
• Marble Hall Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
• Making a Killing, by Cara Hunter (Morrow)
• An Excellent Thing in a Woman, by Allison Montclair (Severn House)
• No Comfort for the Dead, by R.P. O’Donnell (Crooked Lane)
• The Case of the Missing Maid, by Rob Osler (Kensington)
• At Midnight Comes the Cry, by Julia Spencer-Fleming (Minotaur)
• Hunter’s Heart Ridge, by Sarah Stewart Taylor (Minotaur)
• The Botanist’s Assistant, by Peggy Townsend (Berkley)
• No. 10 Doyers Street, by Radha Vatsal (Level Best)

Meanwhile, Agnew has published brief remembrances of “30 great reads” from the last dozen months, including books by both veteran authors and newbies. It’s good to see Mariah Fredericks’ The Girl in the Green Dress, Beth Lewis’ The Rush, and Susie Dent’s Guilty by Definition all mentioned. And look here for a separate post covering top mystery-fiction finds from other Aunt Agatha’s critics.

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Down Under crime-fiction critic Jeff Popple, who writes for the Canberra Weekly as well as Deadly Pleasures, has so far posted two different “best” lists. The first covers his 13 favorite works, all of them released in Australia over the course of 2025:

• Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The White Crow, by Michael Robotham (Sphere)
• Hang On St. Christopher, by Adrian McKinty (Blackstone)
• The Poet’s Game, by Paul Vidich (No Exit Press)
• Mischance Creek, by Garry Disher (Text)
• Unbury the Dead, by Fiona Hardy (Affirm Press)
• Marble Hall Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Century)
• Gunner, by Alan Parks (Baskerville)
• Softly Calls the Devil, by Chris Blake (Echo)
• The Proving Ground, by Michael Connelly (Allen & Unwin)
• Clown Town, by Mick Herron (Baskerville)
• Dust, by Michael Brissenden (Affirm Press)
• Buried Above Ground, by Mike Ripley (Severn House)

In addition, Popple has produced his own collection of what he confidently says are the “Best Debut Novels of 2025.” Works by Jakob Kerr, Tanya Scott, and Ronni Salt all make the cut.

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Last but not least, Steve Donoghue, whose literary criticism has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post, is out with a roster of his own crime- and mystery-fiction recommendations for 2025. He lists them in order of his liking:

1. Tiny Wild Things, by Danielle Wong (Storm)
2. Ted Bell’s Monarch, by Ryan Steck (Berkley)
3. Silent Horizons, by Chad Robichaux, with Jack Stewart (Tyndale)
4. Return to Sender, by Craig Johnson (Viking)
5. Tomlinson’s Wake, by Randy Wayne White (Hanover Square Press)
6. Nightshade, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
7. Midnight Black, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)
8. Hotel Ukraine, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
9. Dead Line, by Marc Cameron (Kensington)
10. Apostle’s Cove, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)

In his mini-review of Ted Bell’s Monarch, Donoghue employs a splendid term I’m going to have to remember for the future: “necro-fiction,” meaning a story that “keeps an established series character going after that character’s creator dies.” Bell breathed his last in 2023, a dozen books into his spy-thriller series starring Lord Alexander Hawke.