Top 5 books I will definitely* read in 2025

A picture hides a thousand lies… And only Iris Grey can uncover the truth.

Iris Grey arrives at Mill Cottage in a picture-perfect Hampshire village, looking to escape from her crumbling marriage. She is drawn to the neighbouring Wetherby family, and is commissioned to paint a portrait of Dominic Wetherby, a celebrated crime writer.

At the Wetherby’s Christmas Eve party, the mulled wine is in full flow — but so too are tensions and rivalries among the guests. On Christmas Day, the youngest member of the Wetherby family, Lorcan, finds a body in the water. A tragic accident? Or a deadly crime?

With the snow falling, Iris enters a world of village gossip, romantic intrigue, buried secrets and murder.

Private, the best investigation unit in the world, has agents who are the smartest, fastest, and most technologically advanced in the world — and they always uncover the truth.

No wonder the most influential men and women on the planet seek their help on a daily basis. But there’s only one client who can make its founder, Jack Morgan, drop everything and fly to London: Princess Caroline, third in line to the British throne. She needs Morgan to find a friend who has mysteriously disappeared, a woman named Sophie Edwards.

Though Princess Caroline insists it’s just a missing-persons case, Morgan knows she’s hiding something. Because Sophie needs to be found before the media become aware of it.

Morgan knows there is more to this case than he is being told. The closer he gets to uncovering the truth, the more he realizes there are powerful people who will stop at nothing to keep Sophie from being found.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse. She steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song — complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

Every serial killer needs a friend.

Every game must have a winner.

When a chance encounter sparks an unlikely bond between rival murderers Sloane and Rowan, the two find something elusive — the friendship of a like-minded, pitch-black soul. From small town West Virginia to upscale California, from downtown Boston to rural Texas, the two hunters collide in an annual game of blood and suffering, one that pits them against the most dangerous monsters in the country.

But as their friendship develops into something more, the restless ghosts left in their wake are only a few steps behind, ready to claim more than just their newfound love. Can Rowan and Sloane dig themselves out of a game of graves? Or have they finally met their match?