Last January was the first time I wrote about my favorite books of the year, and now I’m doing it again for 2025. I didn’t experience as many reading highlights this year as I did in 2024, but I’ve still had fun thinking back and picking out which novels I could barely wait to get back to as I read or listened to them.
Choosing my ten best books of the year made me consider what I look for in a good book. First, I need action. Not necessarily danger or thrills, but definitely forward movement. Beautiful descriptions, meaningful ideas, and dramatic character changes aren’t enough. Something significant needs to happen in the lives of the people I’m reading about—which may be why I never finish some of the Booker Prize winners!
Second, I need plausibility and consistency. I don’t mean realism. Three of the books in last year’s list of favorites were fantasies or science fiction. I’m talking about coherent world-building. Any novel, whether or not it contains magic (or futuristic technology that is the equivalent of magic), can become preposterous. I don’t want the book I’m reading to make me say, “Huh? That’s ridiculous. She would never do that” about a character I’ve gotten to know.
Third, and most importantly, I need interesting characters, and I have to attach myself to one of them. I may be able to finish and appreciate a book without a single likeable character I can identify with, but it’s not going to be a favorite.
I’ll add a fourth characteristic I hope for in a book, though it’s not as important as the other three: I’m delighted when it teaches me something.
A year ago, writing about my favorites of 2024, I listed four mystery writers whose series I had recently discovered and whose books I was determined to read throughout the year until I was caught up with their output. These were Ann Cleeves’s police procedurals with Vera Stanhope, Mick Herron’s Slough House series, Peter Grainger’s books about DC Smith and Chris Waters, and Val McDermid’s cold cases featuring Karen Pirie. I finished these four series in 2025 as planned and am now waiting for the authors’ next books. Two of their latest are on my best-of-the-year list.
The Late Lord Thorpe (2024) by Peter Grainger
Now that he is retired, former policeman DC Smith occasionally works on a case for a private detective agency. Thus, he is hired to look into the supposedly accidental death of Freddie, Lord Thorpe, by his older sister. It doesn’t take long for Smith to begin to suspect that the last people to see Freddie alive are lying to him.
I strongly recommend listening to this book rather than reading it, since Gildart Jackson, a great performer, narrates it.
Silent Bones (2025) by Val McDermid
An investigative journalist who was believed to have left the UK after brutally murdering his pregnant girlfriend turns up as a corpse following a landslide on a highway. This is one of two cold cases Karen Pirie investigates in this excellent book. Watching Pirie encourage and manage her two assistants is fun, and the team’s pursuit of the backgrounds of the two men whose deaths they’re researching is fascinating. This is the eighth book in a great series.
The next two mysteries on my list are also by much-loved authors; in fact, I’ve read all their books.
The Hallmarked Man (2025) by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J. K. Rowling)
This eighth book in the Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott series, which started with The Cuckoo’s Calling, can be read as a standalone. But then the reader will miss the slow construction of the will-they-won’t-they? relationship between the private detectives that has been going on since they met. This investigation requires Corm and Robin to identify a dismembered body discovered in a silver vault. The dead man could be one of several people, so the detectives try to track down each missing man to figure out who is still unaccounted for. The plot is complex and interwoven, but (as always) Rowling makes everything come clear at the end.
The Proving Ground (2025) by Michael Connelly
Yet another eighth book, this time in Connelly’s series featuring Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer. No longer defending criminals, in this novel Haller files a lawsuit against a company whose newest chatbot encouraged a sixteen-year-old boy to kill the girl who broke up with him—and he did it. The AI company has a lot more money to invest in stopping Haller than he has to hire investigators to help him prepare his case. Luckily, a journalist from another of Connelly’s series, Jack McEvoy, offers to do research for him.
The Tainted Cup (2024) by Robert Jackson Bennett
This book, the first in a series of two, with a third one due out soon, is a mystery—but it’s set in a fantasy world whose people have magic powers. The hero, Dinios Kol, is a young man with an inquiring mind and the gift of perfect recall, usually triggered by smell. He’s been assigned as the new assistant to a very eccentric detective, Ana Dolabra, in an empire full of political intrigue. The empire is also threatened by Leviathans, monstrous creatures that dwell along its borders and must be constantly repelled. Dolabra rarely leaves her room, so Dinios does all her investigating, starting with trying to understand how and why a high Imperial officer was murdered in his bath by a plant growing up through his body.
Fourth Wing (2023) by Rebecca Yarros, first book in The Empyrean series
More political intrigue and magic in this book, plus a school that prepares competing youngsters to bond with dragons (if the dragons choose them) and train as dragon riders. After three years of preparation, the dragon riders are sent off to defend their borders in an ongoing war. The heroine, Violet Sorrengail, is small and physically weak and would rather be a scholar than a dragon rider. But her mother commands her to compete. Throw in Violet’s dangerous enemies among the rival dragon riders, and her attraction to the son of an executed rebel leader. The result is a book with a brave, appealing heroine that I found too exciting to put down, even though I was skeptical when I started it.
The Hymn to Dionysus (2025) by Natasha Pulley
Pulley is the author of one of my 2024 favorites, The Mars House, a science fiction novel, while this book is a work of ancient history and a fantasy. It takes place soon after the Trojan War in Thebes, a sternly run city-state that demands extreme self-control from its citizens, particularly its soldiers. The hero is an officer named Phaidros, who has spent his life believing that his honor rests on obedience to his commanding officers and his queen, although many of the violent acts he was required to commit have left him traumatized. Then Dionysus, the god of revelry, madness, and chaos, appears in Thebes, and its people forget about discipline. Expecting Dionysus to kill him, Phaidros slowly realizes the god is healing him and comes to love him.
The Listeners (2025) by Maggie Stiefvater
This is a historical novel set at a magnificent West Virginia hotel during the Second World War. The hotel’s manager, June Hudson, who has been trained by its owner since childhood to provide luxury for guests, is forced by the State Department to house Axis diplomats as part of an attempt to exchange them for their Allied equivalents. June has to force her reluctant staff to provide their enemies with the same excellent service they offer regular guests. She also has to deal with FBI agents at the hotel spying on the diplomats, one of whom is a man June knew when they were children in a poor Appalachian town.
This book’s magic is in the hotel’s healing (or sometimes threatening) natural springs, which can only be controlled by June. I enjoyed everything about this story, which is by an author I have followed for years.
Boy (2025) by Nicole Galland
Sander and Joan have grown up close friends in Elizabethan London. Now a teenager, Sander is a very successful apprentice in the company of actors Shakespeare writes for. The audience loves Sander’s portrayals of young women like Juliet and Rosalind, and his success gains him invitations to the homes, dinner tables, and beds of the nobility. But he is physically outgrowing his female roles and terrified of what will become of his career when he must hand over the work to younger boys. While Sander dresses as a woman for his job, Joan, a budding botanist, apothecary, and natural scientist, is forced to dress as a boy to gain access to the knowledge she craves, especially from the scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon. The lives of these two complex and delightful young people become intertwined with the Earl of Essex’s rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I.
Small Pleasures (2021) by Clare Chambers
This is a quiet, beautifully written, and moving novel set in a 1950s suburb not far from London. An unmarried woman in her late thirties, Jean Swinney lives with her selfish, demanding mother and works at the local newspaper, where she’s permitted to write about recipes and other unimportant things. Then her editor asks her to investigate the claim of a local woman that her daughter was the product of a virgin birth. As Jean gets to know the young woman, her now ten-year-old daughter, and her older husband, and researches her story, we readers get to know Jean, with her intelligence, dry humor, and half-suppressed loneliness. She is an unforgettable character in an odd and memorable story.
I hope I’ve inspired you to try one or more of these books! Please let me know in a comment which book or books you liked best in 2025!
Kim Hays 