My, How It’s Grown!

I’ve been compiling seasonal inventories of forthcoming crime, mystery, and thriller novels for many years now, but until recently, I hadn’t kept track of the number of additions I made to those lists after their initial publication in The Rap Sheet.

When I posted my fall-winter 2025 rundown in mid-September, for instance, I touted it as featuring “more than 425 works.” Another eight found their way onto the rolls by the end of that same month, books I did not know were coming when I produced my guide originally. In October, I bumped the count up by 34. And by the close of November, the tally had gained 62 more titles bound for store and home shelves on both sides of the Atlantic—everything from Eric Heisserer’s Simultaneous, Corey Lynn Fayman’s The Deadly Stingaree, Marisa Kashino’s Best Offer Wins, and Mia P. Manansala’s Death and Dinuguan to Donna Freitas’ Her One Regret, Mark Edwards’ The Christmas Magpie, Terry Shames’ The Curious Poisoning of Jewel Barnes, Christoffer Carlsson’s The Living and the Dead, and Only Way Out, by Tod Goldberg. So now, the number of fresh releases mentioned in that fall-winter catalogue exceeds 550!

That would be an awful lot of books for any single person to digest in three months, and it doesn’t include all of those I thought weren’t worth mentioning or that have somehow still eluded my radar.

Surely, there’s something among those picks for every crime-fiction fan on your holiday gift list. Explore the possibilities here.