Eleventh-Hour Endorsements

As December slowly winds down, so does the number of “best books of the year” articles and lists being published. Marilyn Brooks, who writes the Marilyn’s Mystery Reads blog and teaches on the subject of crime fiction in association with the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Massachusetts, revealed her 2025 favorites just yesterday:

• Havoc, by Christopher Bollen (Harper; first released in hardcover in December 2024, but republished in paperback in November 2025)
• Chain Reaction, by James Byrne (Minotaur)
• Edge, by Tracy Clark (Thomas & Mercer)
• Her Many Faces, by Nicci Cloke (Morrow)
• Too Old for This, by Samantha Downing (Berkley)
• The Queen of Fives, by Alex Hay (Graydon House)
• Nemesis, by Gregg Hurwitz (Minotaur)
• The Deepest Fake, by Daniel Kalla (Simon & Schuster)
• Midnight Burning, by Paul Levine (Amphorae)
• Hang On St. Christopher, by Adrian McKinty (Blackstone)
• Hotel Ukraine, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
• The Mailman, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Mysterious Press)

Additionally, she applauds the late Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death, even though it came out in 2007. “I had never heard of the author until I serendipitously found it on a shelf in my local library,” explains Brooks, “and I was struck both by the title and the cover art.”

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Two other selections of top-drawer crime fiction are available as well. The first comes from Vicki Weisfeld, a regular contributor to the British blog Crime Fiction Lover, and features her top-five novels from 2025 (including Philip Lazar’s debut political thriller, The Tiger and the Bear). And CrimeReads’ latest in a series of reading recaps focuses on “the year’s best new legal thrillers,” among them Victor Suthammanont’s Hollow Spaces, “a psychological thriller about lawyers, in which the adult children of an acquitted murderer are spurred to reinvestigate the case that once tore their family apart.”