International Review of Books

John Scalzi has built a career on making big science-fiction ideas feel like a conversation with a very funny friend, and Monsters of Ohio points that talent at a small Midwestern town that is already having a bad year. Mike Boyd, recently laid off from his government job, heads home to Richland, Ohio, just as the food-processing plant that keeps the town afloat is being wound down by its private-equity owners.

Then a prize cow explodes at the worst possible moment, and some of the locals begin transforming into creatures nobody has a name for. Mike falls in with Dave, an old friend who is now a police officer, and Andi, a newcomer who has taken on the thankless job of running the town festival. Together they try to piece together what is going on while the rest of Richland argues, panics and, in a few memorable cases, grows extra limbs.

What lifts the book above a simple monster romp is its setting. Scalzi clearly cares about towns like Richland, and the comedy never punches down at the people who live there. The real horror is quieter: shuttered factories, absentee owners and the sense that decisions about a community's future are being made somewhere far away. The jokes land, the pacing is brisk and the central trio are easy company. Readers who came to Scalzi through Old Man's War or The Kaiju Preservation Society will find the same warmth and wit, now wrapped around a story about home, work and belonging.

Cassandra Clare's Shadowhunter books have kept readers hooked for nearly two decades, and The Last King of Faerie opens The Wicked Powers, billed as the final trilogy in that sprawling saga. Published this week, it picks up threads that devoted fans have been waiting years to see resolved, and it is already near the top of the teen new-release chart.

The story moves on several fronts. Dru Blackthorn is taken into the realm of Faerie by Ash Morgenstern, a prince whose ambitions could reshape both the mortal and magical worlds. Meanwhile Kit Herondale and Ty Blackthorn are drawn into investigating a disappearance that seems to connect to much larger dangers. As the strands begin to weave together, old loyalties are tested and long-simmering feelings come to the surface.

Clare is at her best when she is juggling a large cast, and she does so here with a familiar mix of witty banter, longing glances and sudden reversals. Faerie is lush, beautiful and treacherous, a court where every bargain hides a trap and every kindness may be a strategy. The alternating viewpoints keep the momentum high across a long book, and there are several moments that will have fans gasping.

This is very much a book for readers already invested in the Blackthorns and Herondales. Newcomers will find the backstory dense, and would be better off starting with The Dark Artifices or earlier series. For those who have followed the Shadowhunters this far, though, it is a big, romantic and adventurous beginning to the end of an era.

Weina Dai Randel, author of The Last Rose of Shanghai, sets her new novel in a corner of China that few readers will have met in fiction. In the 1950s, around the shores of Lugu Lake, the Moso people live in a matriarchal society where there is no marriage, households are organised around mothers, and women choose their own partners.

Lazo, a spirited young Moso woman, finds her world turned upside down when two American brothers become stranded in the area. Adam is an artist, captivated by the landscape and its people; Noah is a physician who carries the weight of a painful past. As the brothers are drawn into village life, the connections between them and Lazo grow complicated, and affection gives way to rivalry and jealousy.

The story then widens into a multigenerational quest, as later characters try to piece together a secret that has stayed buried for decades. Randel handles the shifts in time with care, letting each revelation reshape what the reader thought they knew about the earlier events.

The real pleasure is the setting. Randel writes the lake and surrounding mountains with genuine beauty and approaches Moso traditions with curiosity and respect rather than treating them as an exotic backdrop. The romance is tender, the family drama is absorbing, and the questions about freedom, belonging and the choices women make give the novel substance. It is already riding high on the US historical fiction new-release chart, and it should appeal to admirers of Lisa See, Kristin Hannah or Janie Chang.

Jane Schoenbrun, the filmmaker behind the cult hit I Saw the TV Glow, makes a striking debut as a novelist with Public Access Afterworld, a sprawling and eerie book about the stories that reach us through screens and the people who disappear into them.

The novel unfolds across several decades. In late-1980s Dallas, a local weatherman encounters something he cannot explain. In 2009, as American television switches from analogue to digital broadcasting, two teenagers, David and Erin, become fixated on a signal that should not exist. Years later, Bethany Peters, a trans content moderator at a vast tech company in Austin, finds herself drawn into the same mystery. Linking them all is a pirate channel that appears to transmit from somewhere beyond the static.

This is horror built on atmosphere, memory and identity rather than jump scares. Schoenbrun is fascinated by how media shapes our sense of self, and by the outsiders who find a kind of belonging in late-night broadcasts and online rabbit holes. The book also deals with heavy emotional territory, handled with care, and readers should expect some difficult moments. The structure is ambitious, shifting voices and formats, and at over six hundred pages it asks for patience. Those willing to settle in will be rewarded with hypnotic prose and a mood that lingers long after the last page. Admirers of the film will recognise its preoccupations, and readers who love David Lynch, House of Leaves or internet folklore will find plenty to obsess over.

Richard Paul Evans, best known for The Christmas Box, has a loyal readership for heartfelt stories, and Mercy's Child went straight into the hardcover fiction top twenty in its first week on sale. The novel is set in 1874 and follows Etta Wheeler, a young woman from upstate New York who moves to Manhattan at the height of the Gilded Age.

Working among the overcrowded tenements of Hell's Kitchen, Etta encounters a little girl who is being cruelly mistreated, and she is horrified to learn that the law of the day offers almost nothing to protect children from the adults responsible for them. Refusing to look away, she begins knocking on doors that would rather stay shut, and soon finds herself challenging powerful institutions and the comfortable assumptions of an entire society.

Evans draws on a real nineteenth-century case that helped spark the modern child-protection movement in the United States, and he uses the contrast between the city's grinding poverty and its glittering wealth to strong effect. The subject matter is painful at times, and readers sensitive to depictions of child abuse should be aware of it, though Evans handles those scenes with restraint. The emphasis is firmly on courage, compassion and the difference that one determined person can make.

The prose is clear and accessible, and the pace makes it a quick read despite its weighty theme. It is an easy recommendation for readers who enjoy hopeful, character-led historical fiction grounded in true events, and a natural choice for a winter book club.

Lindsey Fitzharris, the medical historian behind The Butchering Art and The Facemaker, brings her talent for grisly yet gripping storytelling to the birth of forensic investigation in Sleuth-Hound. Her subject is Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh surgeon whose remarkable powers of observation so impressed a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle that he became a model for Sherlock Holmes.

Fitzharris quickly shows that Bell's real life was every bit as fascinating as his fictional echo. Working with the city's police surgeon, Henry Littlejohn, he helped bring scientific reasoning into criminal cases at a time when such methods were still novel and often viewed with suspicion. Poisonings, suspicious deaths and courtroom battles fill the pages, and each case reveals something about how Victorian society understood guilt and proof.

The book also follows Bell's later connection with Conan Doyle, including their involvement in efforts to overturn a murder conviction that looked deeply unsafe, and it captures the public frenzy that surrounded the hunt for Jack the Ripper. Throughout, Fitzharris places these stories in their medical and social context, explaining how advances in chemistry, anatomy and observation began to change policing.

As in her earlier books, she balances vivid, sometimes stomach-turning detail with warmth, curiosity and a dry sense of humour, so the history never feels dusty. It is a lively, well-researched account that will delight Holmes fans, history lovers and true crime readers alike, and anyone who has wondered how detectives first learned to let the evidence speak for itself.

Kim Ghattas, the Beirut-born journalist behind Black Wave, turns a decades-old cold case into a sweeping and personal history in The Best Kind of American. On 18 January 1984, Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut, was shot dead in a corridor outside his office. Kerr was a respected scholar of the Arab world who had grown up partly in Lebanon and loved it deeply, and his killing was never formally investigated or brought to justice.

Ghattas reconstructs Kerr's life and the circumstances of his death with patience and care. She follows his family, including a son who would later become famous in American sport, through their long struggle to learn who was responsible and why, and to come to terms with how little official interest there was in finding out.

The book's scope is much wider than a single crime. Ghattas traces how Lebanon's civil war became a stage on which wider regional and global rivalries played out, and how the enduring hostility between the United States, Iran and Israel took shape in that period. She shows how one man's death sat at the intersection of those forces, and how the consequences continue to be felt.

Having grown up in Beirut during the war herself, Ghattas writes with authority and emotion but never loses her journalistic discipline. The narrative is clear and well paced, guiding readers through complex politics without overwhelming them. For anyone who likes true crime with genuine historical depth, this is a moving and illuminating account of loss, memory and the people caught between great powers.

The Heights is Ian Rankin's first standalone thriller in roughly twenty years, and it finds the creator of John Rebus on fine form in an unfamiliar setting. Published by Orion in October and described by its publisher as an instant Sunday Times bestseller, it was praised in Laura Wilson's Guardian crime round-up as being well up to his usual high standard.

The setting is The Heights, a luxurious new high-rise looming over Hyde Park, built for the global super-rich. Its residents are used to discretion, security and getting their own way. When the night concierge is found murdered in the lobby, that bubble bursts, and Detective Sergeant Gillian Gish arrives to start asking questions. She is a London native, cynical, bolshie and quietly decent, and the gulf between her world and theirs drives much of the novel's energy.

Rankin structures the story like a traditional closed-circle mystery. Each floor brings new suspects with secrets to protect, and a couple of subplots complicate matters further. He keeps the many strands clear and moving, and his eye for the absurdities of extreme wealth gives the book a satirical edge.

What lifts it above a simple puzzle is Gish herself, a heroine with a clear moral compass and a dry wit that makes her excellent company. The final twists are neatly set up and satisfying. Rebus fans will not feel short-changed, and newcomers have an ideal starting point.

Murder Most Cryptic is the debut novel of Alys Cummings, a journalist who worked on local newspapers, for a news agency at the Old Bailey and for BBC Panorama. Published by Michael Joseph in October and featured in Laura Wilson's Guardian crime round-up, it is a puzzle mystery with a genuinely fresh hook: the clues are cryptic crossword clues, and readers can try to solve them alongside the characters.

The heroine, Nina, is a talented young reporter and a recovering alcoholic who goes to a weekly support group in a local church hall. When an unfamiliar man joins one evening, everyone assumes he has come for help. Moments later he collapses and dies. The police conclude it was an accident, but the group find a crossword clue in his pocket, and the answer is Murder. More clues then start to appear in a newspaper's crossword, each more menacing than the last, and the group realise one of them could be next.

Cummings plays fair with her puzzles, building them into the narrative and supplying the solutions at the end, so solvers and non-solvers alike can enjoy the ride. The cast of misfits is likeable, and their shared struggles with addiction lend the story more emotional weight than the average cosy mystery. There is a darker edge, too, as the threats escalate.

The tone occasionally wobbles between light-hearted puzzling and serious subject matter, and the plot leans on coincidence at times. Still, this is an inventive, entertaining debut, ideal for anyone who starts the day with a crossword and ends it with a whodunnit.

Veronica Roth returns to the world that made her famous with The Sixth Faction, easily one of the most talked-about young adult releases of the autumn. Rather than a conventional sequel or prequel, the novel offers an alternate version of the Divergent universe, asking what might have happened if a single moment had gone differently.

Beatrice Prior is preparing for the Choosing Ceremony, where every sixteen-year-old in her city must commit to one of the factions that structure society. She is ready to leave her family's way of life behind and join the daring Dauntless. Then a tragedy at the ceremony itself sends her life down a completely different road. Instead of the path readers remember, Beatrice finds herself pulled toward an underground rebellion and an intriguing boy known only by a number.

Roth clearly relishes playing with expectations. Familiar locations and characters appear in new arrangements, loyalties shift in surprising directions, and longtime fans will enjoy spotting where this version diverges from the one they know. Crucially, though, the book stands on its own, so newcomers can follow it without having read the original trilogy.

The action is brisk, the world feels lived-in, and the questions at its heart, about conformity, identity and the cost of choosing who you are, remain as pointed as they were more than a decade ago. The book is the first half of a planned duology, with the conclusion expected next year, so be prepared for an ending that leaves you wanting more. A treat for nostalgic fans and an excellent entry point for a new generation.

Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors and A Better World, has a talent for finding the dread lurking inside the lives people curate for public view, and Trad Wife may be her most timely novel yet. Jenny Kaplan is a journalist whose reputation has taken a damaging public knock. Hoping for a comeback, she secures a profile of Mia Wright, a hugely popular trad-wife influencer who shares a picture-perfect life of baking, homeschooling and devotion to her seven children on a Pennsylvania farm.

Once Jenny arrives, the idyll begins to fray. The children recite strange nursery rhymes, Jenny starts losing chunks of time, and she senses that the farm runs on rules no one will explain. As her investigation deepens, the line between a story about online performance and something genuinely uncanny grows thinner, and Jenny has to ask whether she is still the one doing the reporting.

Langan balances social satire with real chills. She is interested in why so many people find the trad-wife aesthetic comforting, and she resists turning Mia into a simple villain, which makes the unease far more effective. The novel also has a lot to say about ambition, motherhood and the bargains women are pressured to make, but it never forgets to be a page-turner. It sits comfortably beside classics such as Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives while feeling rooted in the present feed-scrolling moment. A smart, unsettling pick for book clubs looking for something that will start an argument.

Lynn Painter, author of Better Than the Movies and The Do-Over, has become one of the most dependable names in young adult romantic comedy, and Trust Fall shows exactly why. Julia Lowell is a teenager from small-town Nebraska whose family receives an astonishing inheritance from an elderly friend they knew simply as Lou. There is a condition attached: to claim the money, they must spend six months living in his grand home on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Overnight, Julia's world changes. She and her twin are enrolled at an exclusive private academy, she is navigating a city that feels like another planet, and she is assigned a maths tutor, Damion Rutledge, who turns out to be Lou's great-nephew. Damion is convinced the Lowells must have manipulated their way into the will, and he intends to find proof. Julia, naturally, intends to prove him spectacularly wrong.

The novel alternates between their perspectives, which lets Painter have fun with misunderstandings and double meanings while gradually revealing what each of them is hiding. The enemies-to-lovers banter is quick and genuinely funny, and the slow-burn romance delivers plenty of swoon. Beneath the comedy, though, there is real feeling about grief, family loyalty and what it means to feel out of place among people with far more money and confidence.

It is light, warm and extremely bingeable, the kind of book readers finish late at night and immediately recommend to friends. Its strong showing on both the teen bestseller and new-release charts suggests it is already doing just that.

Jeneva Rose made her name with twisty domestic thrillers such as The Perfect Marriage, and in Sometimes I Scare Myself she moves confidently into horror with three stories that suit long autumn nights. Each one is self-contained, but they share a fascination with guilt and with the moment ordinary people realise they have crossed a line.

In the opening story, a thirtieth-birthday celebration featuring a hired medium goes badly wrong, and the guests make a choice that will follow them. The second, and perhaps the strongest, takes the Dalton family into a house with a dreadful history, told largely through the perspective of a new mother already wrestling with sleeplessness and self-doubt; Rose uses that fragile state of mind to keep the reader unsure what is real. The final story visits a roadside shop where every item comes with a curse, then strands its characters in a cabin during a storm.

Rose keeps the thriller writer's instinct for pace. The prose is lean, the hooks arrive early, and each story builds toward a satisfying sting rather than relying on gore. The horror is mostly psychological and social, rooted in secrets and the fear that the people closest to you cannot be trusted. That makes the collection a good gateway for readers who enjoy suspense and want to try something spookier without committing to a doorstop. Five weeks on the hardcover fiction bestseller list suggest plenty of her existing fans have already followed her into the dark.

Louise O'Neill made her name with hard-hitting fiction such as Only Ever Yours and Asking For It. In A Bigger Life, published by HQ in September, she turns her clear eye on herself. The memoir has been reviewed in The Irish Times and the Irish Independent and is on the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards shortlist.

The book begins with a breakup. At thirty-eight, O'Neill's long relationship ends, along with the house and future she had planned around it. She writes honestly about the panic that follows, the cultural messaging that tells women over thirty-five they are running out of time, and her fears about motherhood and desirability. Rather than settle, she sets out to discover what she wants, travelling to Paris, London and New York, going on a great many dates and experimenting with wellness practices, retreats and therapies.

The strongest passages connect this adventure to her history: years lost to an eating disorder, the aftermath of sexual assault, and a long struggle to feel at home in her body. Against that background, her pursuit of pleasure and connection feels like a reclaiming. She is also perceptive about how online discourse turns dating into a battleground, and she finds, to her own surprise, more good people than bad.

Critics have noted that the book could probe the costs of its wellness journey more deeply, and readers wary of self-discovery memoirs may feel the format is familiar. Yet O'Neill's humour, candour and warmth make it a generous companion, especially for anyone navigating heartbreak or the pressure to have life figured out.

C. J. Tudor has built a strong following with The Chalk Man, The Burning Girls and The Drift, novels that sit somewhere between crime and horror. Serenity Falls, published by Michael Joseph in September and reviewed by Lisa Tuttle in The Guardian's round-up of recent horror, is one of her most enjoyable books yet, swapping English villages for the manicured lawns of Florida.

The premise is classic. Dan, a widower, and his daughter Sadie move from the UK to Serenity Falls, a carefully planned community that boasts of having no crime. It seems the perfect place to start again. Almost immediately, though, a body is discovered in their pool, and as Dan starts asking questions he learns that the town has a long record of fatal accidents stretching back over its fifty years. As the community prepares to celebrate its anniversary, more odd discoveries pile up, from empty houses to unexplained activity at night.

Tudor's great skill is in making the ordinary sinister. Neighbourly kindness feels like surveillance, and rules that seem quaint gradually look like something worse. She balances suspense with warmth, particularly in the relationship between Dan and Sadie, and with the wry humour that runs through her work.

The book is long, and the middle section occasionally lingers, but the payoff is worth the wait. It will appeal to fans of Stephen King's small-town horror, Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and anyone who has ever suspected that a town seemed too good to be true.

Ariel Lawhon, whose The Frozen River became a word-of-mouth favourite, turns to sixteenth-century Ireland and one of its most legendary figures in The Pirate Queen. Grace O'Malley, remembered in Irish as Gráinne Mhaol, grows up in a seafaring clan on the west coast at a moment when English power is pressing ever harder on Irish lands and customs.

Sent away to be fostered with another clan, as was common at the time, and later pushed into a marriage she did not choose, Grace refuses to settle for the narrow life laid out for her. Lawhon follows her as she proves herself on the water, takes command of the O'Malley fleet and comes into direct conflict with the officials Elizabeth I has sent to impose order on Ireland. The result is a story of survival and defiance in which every victory comes at a cost.

The book is generous in scope, with storms, raids, shifting alliances and plenty of courtroom-style political manoeuvring, but Lawhon never loses sight of the woman at its centre. Grace's relationships with her family, her crew and her children give the adventure emotional weight, and her mixture of pragmatism and pride makes her compelling company. The historical texture is rich without becoming heavy, and the long page count passes quickly. Seven weeks on the hardcover fiction bestseller list suggest readers are responding. Fans of Philippa Gregory, Kate Quinn or Lawhon's earlier novels will find a rousing portrait of a leader that history has never quite managed to tame.

Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists, has always been interested in how people bargain with time, and Under Story carries that fascination to the bottom of the world. Laurel Salter is a trained biologist who has chosen to work as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, a job that lets her stay busy and keep a painful past firmly out of view.

That plan falls apart when a strange light, soon nicknamed the Arc, appears over the ice. A team of physicists flies in to investigate, and among them is Eli, Laurel's ex-husband. Forced back into each other's orbit in a place where there is nowhere to hide, the two of them have to deal with the phenomenon and with everything they never said. Laurel develops a theory that the Arc might allow them to reach back and change what has already happened, and the novel's tension comes from the question of whether she should try.

Benjamin drew inspiration from a real balloon-borne physics experiment flown over Antarctica, and the scientific scaffolding is handled with a light, confident touch rather than a lecture. The real strength is emotional: grief, love and regret are explored with patience, and the setting of perpetual daylight, wind and enforced closeness turns every conversation into a pressure test. At over five hundred pages it asks for commitment, but it rewards readers who enjoy literary fiction with a speculative edge in the vein of Station Eleven or Klara and the Sun.

Few writers have shaped modern romantic fiction quite like Cecelia Ahern, whose debut PS, I Love You became an international phenomenon. Her latest novel, Love Unlocked, published by HarperFiction in August, has been shortlisted at the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards, and it shows her still finding fresh ways to write about love.

The setup is a delightful blend of rom-com and mystery. Al, an engineer still reeling from discovering that his fiancée and his best friend were together behind his back, has had all the love locks removed from a Dublin bridge because their weight is a safety risk. Shortly afterwards, couples begin splitting up at an alarming rate, not only in Dublin but across the world. Melody, a commitment-shy podcaster who has decided love is not for her, starts digging into the phenomenon and soon tracks down the man responsible.

What follows is a gently magical romance in which two people who have given up on love are drawn together while trying to solve everyone else's heartbreak. Ahern grounds the whimsy in history by weaving in letters and the story of Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett, the Irish revolutionaries who married in Kilmainham Gaol in 1916 on the eve of his execution. Those sections add poignancy and a sense of how love endures.

The middle section repeats itself a little, and the plot relies on convenient meetings. But Ahern's humour, generosity and gift for character carry it. This is a comforting, uplifting read for fans of her earlier work and anyone in need of a little enchantment.

Michelle Good made a remarkable debut with Five Little Indians, which won the Governor General's Literary Award and Canada Reads in 2022. Her second novel, Eliza Sunshine, is on the 2026 Giller Prize shortlist, and it widens her lens from a group of survivors to a single family seen across three generations of Cree women.

Eliza is the hinge of the book. She returns home after years spent in a residential school, carrying experiences she cannot easily name, to a community and a family that have also been changed by her absence. Her grandmother Swan, her nôhkom, holds older knowledge and older griefs, while Eliza's daughter Ella grows up in the long shadow of what happened before she was born. Good, a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation who spent years as a lawyer representing residential school survivors, has said the novel draws on her own family history.

That closeness shows in the detail. The novel is attentive to everyday life, to work, food, humour and the push and pull between relatives who love each other but cannot always reach each other. Good writes plainly and with great control, letting the historical injustice sit underneath the story rather than on top of it, so that its impact accumulates gradually.

If there is a reservation, it is that the steady pace asks for patience in the early chapters. Readers who give it that patience will find a deeply humane novel about inheritance, resilience and the ways women keep culture alive under pressure.

At 81, M. John Harrison is one of the elder statesmen of British speculative fiction, and The End of Everything, published by Serpent's Tail, has put him on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist. Should he win on 9 November, he would be the oldest winner in the prize's history. The novel shows why his admirers prize him and why he can divide readers.

The setting is the coastline of Kent in a near future that has already lived through some kind of catastrophe. No one can explain what happened. The government barely functions, the sea teems with new forms of life, Europe has somehow gone missing and the sky itself seems to malfunction. Phillip Tennent gets by on the tideline, picking up artefacts from the Channel, until he retrieves something that keeps changing and that he cannot simply sell or hide. He has to take it inland.

Harrison is less interested in answers than in atmosphere and perception. His prose is exact and luminous, full of chalky light, damp seaside towns and uneasy encounters, and the reader is invited to dwell in uncertainty rather than solve it. Beneath the strangeness is sharp satire about a society that keeps going about its business while its explanations of the world collapse.

Reviews have ranged from rapturous to sceptical, with The Irish Times finding it rudderless and The Guardian praising its vision. That is a fair guide: if you want a conventional apocalypse with clear stakes, this is not it. If you enjoy fiction that unsettles and lingers, it is a remarkable experience.

Kelly McCaughrain has already collected a shelf of awards in Ireland for her earlier novels, Flying Tips for Flightless Birds and the Carnegie-shortlisted Little Bang. Just Another Dead Boy, published by Walker Books in June 2026, is her first speculative romance, and it has earned a place on the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards shortlist.

The premise is striking. In a world where people can learn their exact death dates, the rich are able to check in to exclusive resorts to enjoy their final weeks in comfort. Regan works at one of these resorts, and she is very good at her job: helping guests feel they have found true love before they die. The cardinal rule is that she must never fall in love herself. Then she meets Jude, a guest with just one week to live, and their carefully scripted romance begins to slip off the page.

McCaughrain balances the big ideas with a light touch. The banter between Regan and Jude is sharp and funny, and their relationship develops with genuine tenderness. Beneath the romance lies a pointed critique of a system in which the poor provide comfort to the wealthy at the end of life, and the novel asks how anyone should spend the time they have.

It is a story about grief and hope as much as love, and the emotional moments hit hard, so sensitive readers should be prepared. The ending stays with you. Teens and adults who enjoyed Adam Silvera's They Both Die at the End will find a thoughtful, moving companion here.

Patrick Radden Keefe, the author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, is one of the finest narrative journalists working today, and London Falling is still near the top of the US true crime chart months after release. The book begins with a single death. In November 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler fell from a luxury riverside apartment building into the Thames. The official response was quick to treat it as a tragedy rather than a crime, but his parents, Matthew and Rachelle, could not accept that explanation.

Grieving and frustrated, they began to investigate on their own, and what they found was startling. Zac had been leading a double life, presenting himself to new acquaintances under an invented identity as the son of a wealthy Russian. That persona had pulled him into a murky world of fixers, would-be power brokers and people with good reasons to keep their affairs hidden.

Keefe tells the family's story with great compassion, giving full weight to their grief and determination, but he also widens the lens. The book becomes a portrait of modern London as a magnet for questionable fortunes, where luxury property and opaque wealth make it easy for some people to slip beyond scrutiny. He is unsparing about the shortcomings of the police response and the institutional reluctance to ask hard questions.

As ever, Keefe's research is meticulous and his prose is elegant without showing off. The result reads with the momentum of a thriller while carrying the weight of serious investigative reporting. Gripping, humane and quietly angry, it is essential reading for true crime fans who want more than a puzzle.

Liz Nugent has a gift for narrators who make readers squirm, and The Truth About Ruby Cooper, published in March by Sandycove, the Irish imprint of Penguin, is one of her most daring books. It was reviewed in The Irish Times crime column, chosen as RTÉ's Book of the Week, and has been shortlisted at the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards. Nugent's website reports that it went to number one in the Irish charts.

The story begins in Boston, where Ruby Cooper and her sister Erin are raised within a tight church community that values appearances. When Ruby is sixteen, an incident occurs that splits the family and sets off a chain of consequences lasting decades. As adults the sisters live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Ruby in Dublin and Erin in Boston, but neither can escape what happened.

Nugent is less concerned with a single shocking revelation than with how a family constructs and defends its version of events. She examines rivalry between siblings, the way communities assign guilt, and how a lie can become an inheritance. Ruby herself is complex and often unsettling company; Nugent gives her a voice that is sharp, funny and self-justifying, and refuses to make her simply a victim or a villain.

The novel deals with sexual violence and an accusation that divides a family, and it handles those themes in a way that will provoke debate. Some readers may find it hard going. But the craftsmanship is undeniable, the structure is beautifully controlled, and the final pages land with real force. It is essential reading for fans of dark, character-driven suspense.

Wild People Quiet, shortlisted for the 2026 Giller Prize, is the kind of historical novel that illuminates a chapter many readers will know little about. Tara Gereaux, a Regina author whose earlier books include Saltus and Size of a Fist, sets her story in 1946 in Torduvalle, a small Saskatchewan town where reputations are everything and differences are noticed.

Florence Banks has made herself fit in. She is Métis, but she lives as a white woman, colouring her hair blonde and guarding her history carefully. Her careful life begins to shift when Métis labourers come to work on local farms, and when government plans to remove Métis people from their land start to take shape. Suddenly the community Florence has kept at arm's length is on her doorstep, and the cost of her silence becomes impossible to ignore.

Gereaux is good on the textures of postwar prairie life: the weather, the work, the small social rituals that police who belongs. She avoids melodrama, preferring to let pressure build through glances, half-truths and conversations that stop when someone enters the room. Florence is not always likeable, and that is a strength; her compromises are shown as survival rather than simple betrayal.

The pacing is measured, and readers who want a fast plot may find the middle section slow. But the novel's moral seriousness and emotional honesty are considerable. It is a rewarding read for fans of quiet, character-driven historical fiction and anyone interested in Indigenous histories of the Canadian West.

May We Feed the King is the first novel from Rebecca Perry, a poet previously shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and it has become one of the literary stories of 2026: shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and, according to its publisher, a Sunday Times bestseller. It is also one of the most unusual historical novels in recent memory.

The book moves between two worlds. In the present day, an unnamed curator arrives at a historic palace to create the period room displays that visitors walk through, sourcing historically accurate food and objects with obsessive care. In the archive, the curator encounters the record of a short-lived medieval king, a reluctant ruler who inherited the throne after both his older brothers died and who seemed to want nothing to do with power. As doubts about his fitness to rule grow at court, the idea takes hold that someone else might rule in his place.

Perry refuses the usual comforts of the genre. Names are withheld, motives are obscured, and we see the court in glimpses: through windows, from thresholds, in overheard fragments. At the same time the physical detail is extraordinarily vivid, from banquet dishes to fabrics and light. The effect is of standing in a beautifully staged room, trying to imagine the lives that once filled it.

That ambiguity will not suit every reader, and anyone seeking a conventional royal drama should look elsewhere. But as a meditation on what history can and cannot tell us, it is clever, sensuous and haunting.

The Jasmine Murders, published by Aleph Book Company in New Delhi and reviewed in The Hindu in March, introduces a new crime-solving partnership in Indian fiction. Roopa Unnikrishnan, making her debut as a novelist, sets the story in the early 1960s in Manamadurai, a provincial town in southern Tamil Nadu.

Jayan, a young officer, has taken up his post as Assistant Superintendent of Police, and he brings with him his new wife, Uma, whom he married just forty days earlier. Both are from Kerala, so they are newcomers in more ways than one: learning the language and customs of the town while still discovering each other. When a string of crimes unsettles the community, Jayan is under pressure to find answers, and Uma, sharp-eyed and quietly determined, becomes an unofficial partner in the investigation.

Much of the book's appeal lies in its setting. Unnikrishnan evokes the heat, the scent of jasmine, the social hierarchies and the fault lines that run beneath small-town life, and she captures a newly independent India still shaped by colonial institutions. The author has said the couple were partly inspired by her parents, and the gradual deepening of their marriage is one of the novel's quiet pleasures.

The plotting is solid rather than flashy, and readers expecting relentless twists may find the pace gentle. But the story builds to a vivid finale on the coast near Dhanushkodi, and the characters are engaging enough that a series feels very welcome. Recommended for fans of historical mysteries with a strong sense of place.

The Erin Patterson trial was one of the most closely followed criminal cases in Australian history. In July 2023, Patterson served a lunch in Leongatha, Victoria, after which three of her guests died and a fourth fell gravely ill from death cap mushroom poisoning. In July 2025, after a ten-week trial in Morwell, she was found guilty of three murders and one attempted murder; she has since been sentenced to life imprisonment and has lodged an appeal.

Among the writers in the public gallery were Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, three of the country's leading literary nonfiction authors. Rather than each writing a separate account, they recorded their conversations, originally with a podcast in mind, during the long drives between Melbourne and the courthouse. The Mushroom Tapes, published by Text in November 2025, is the result, and it topped the 2025 bestseller list at Readings, the Melbourne bookseller.

The conversational format is the book's great strength. The three authors challenge each other, change their minds and admit their own discomfort at being drawn into a spectacle. They discuss motive and evidence, but also media behaviour, the appetite for true crime, and what it means to make literature from other people's grief. Throughout, they show real compassion for the victims, the survivor and the children caught up in the case.

Readers wanting a definitive, chronological account of the trial may find the structure loose. But as an intelligent, candid study of why such stories grip us, it stands apart from the rest of the genre.

All Her Lives is the first work of fiction from Ingrid Horrocks, a Wellington writer previously known for her memoir Where We Swim, two poetry collections and a literary history of women travellers. In May 2026 it won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, worth $65,000, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, beating a strong shortlist that included Catherine Chidgey.

The book gathers nine stories, each centred on a woman at a particular point in her life, and together they span more than two centuries. Horrocks moves from girls raised in the garden of Truby King, the founder of New Zealand's Plunket child-health movement, to a queer university student at a Berlin rave in the mid-2000s, to rural Wairarapa and the icy ports of Norway. In one of the most affecting pieces, a mother has to reckon with what her son's climate rebellion will cost the family.

Threaded through the collection is Mary Wollstonecraft, whose eighteenth-century journey through Scandinavia, undertaken in grief and political ferment, becomes a kind of guiding presence. Horrocks uses her lightly, as an echo rather than a lesson, and the effect is to make the women's struggles feel connected across time.

The writing is controlled and observant, with sentences that reward attention, and the judges' description of the book as emotionally intelligent and historically alert feels apt. Some readers may want more plot from individual stories, but the cumulative effect is rich and quietly powerful. This is a fine choice for anyone who loves literary short fiction or historically minded writing about women's lives.

Fierceland, Omar Musa's second novel, won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction, and it is easy to see why judges responded to its scale and nerve. At its centre is a family summoned home. Roz, an artist based in Sydney, and her brother Harun, who lives in Los Angeles, return to Kota Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo after the death of their father, Yusuf Mansur, a palm-oil magnate whose wealth came at a cost to land and people.

The funeral is only the starting point. Musa opens in 1998 with a trip into the forest, then roams freely across time: the parents' meeting in Adelaide as students, the siblings' divergent adult lives, and strands set in 1970s Nigeria and nineteenth-century Venice. Joseph Conrad appears in person, and the novel can be read as a deliberate answer to Heart of Darkness, told from the side of the people and places such stories usually silence.

What makes the book distinctive is its chorus of voices. Musa, who is also a poet and performer, writes with rhythm and swagger, and he lets the forest speak alongside his human characters, drawing on the Malay hikayat storytelling tradition. That sometimes makes for demanding reading, and not every thread carries equal weight. But the anger about environmental destruction is matched by real compassion for a family trying to understand what their father built and what it destroyed. It is a bold, generous novel for readers who like their literary fiction expansive.

Suzanne Collins's return to Panem remains the top-selling teen book in the US more than eighteen months after release, and a movie tie-in edition has joined the original on the children's bestseller list. Sunrise on the Reaping goes back to the fiftieth Hunger Games, the second Quarter Quell, when twice the usual number of tributes are sent into the arena to mark the anniversary.

One of those tributes is a teenage Haymitch Abernathy from District 12, decades before he becomes the sardonic, hard-drinking mentor readers met in the original trilogy. Collins introduces us to the young man he was before the Games: his family, his first love and the community he would do anything to protect. When his name is called, everything he cares about is placed at risk.

The arena sequences are tense and inventive, full of the strategic twists that made the series famous, but the real power of the book lies elsewhere. Collins uses Haymitch's experience to explore propaganda, media spectacle and the ways an oppressive government turns its citizens' lives into entertainment. She is particularly sharp on how stories get rewritten by those in charge, and that idea gives the novel a resonance beyond the plot.

Knowing roughly where Haymitch ends up only heightens the sense of dread. This is one of the darker instalments in the series and better suited to older teens and adults, yet it is also among the most thoughtful. It makes a gripping standalone and deepens the original books immeasurably on a reread.

Marcus Kliewer's debut has quietly become one of the most dependable horror sellers of recent years, and it is still sitting in the US top dozen this autumn. Its premise is beautifully simple. Charlie and her partner Eve have bought a rambling fixer-upper, hoping it will give them a fresh start. One day a family appears on the doorstep: they used to live in the house, they say, and would love a quick look around for old times' sake.

Agreeing seems like the decent thing to do. What follows is best discovered without any warning, so we will only say that the visit does not go as planned and that Charlie soon struggles to understand what is happening in her own home. Kliewer is excellent at building dread out of tiny details: a conversation that lasts a beat too long, a door that is not where it should be, a guest who seems far too comfortable.

The short chapters and puzzle-like structure make the book hard to put down, and Kliewer plays cleverly with Charlie's uncertainty so that the reader is never quite sure who or what to trust. Underneath the scares lie real questions about relationships, boundaries and the vulnerability of opening your door to strangers. It is not a gory novel; its power comes from tension and disorientation. For anyone who enjoyed the slow-burn chills of Shirley Jackson or the modern unease of Riley Sager, this is a tight, unsettling read best saved for a dark evening.

Kristin Hannah's The Women was one of the biggest novels of 2024 in hardcover, and its new paperback edition has carried it straight back onto the bestseller lists. Frankie McGrath is a sheltered young woman from a comfortable Southern California family who, in 1965, surprises everyone by joining the Army Nurse Corps and shipping out to Vietnam.

Nothing in her upbringing has prepared her for what she finds. Frankie learns her trade in field hospitals under constant pressure, treating terrible injuries and forming fierce friendships with the other women who serve alongside her. Hannah renders these chapters with vivid, often harrowing detail, but also with warmth and humour, capturing how people find ways to keep going in impossible circumstances.

The second half follows Frankie home to an America that is bitterly divided over the war and, to her shock, largely indifferent to the women who served in it. Struggling to be seen and believed, she must find a way to rebuild her life. These quieter sections are every bit as powerful as the battlefield scenes, and they give the novel its lasting emotional punch.

Hannah, author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds, excels at this kind of storytelling: major historical events seen through one woman's courage, grief and resilience. It is a long and emotional read, best approached with tissues close by, and it has clearly struck a chord with readers. For book clubs looking for a story that opens up conversations about memory, service and recognition, it is hard to beat.

Five years after its first publication, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary remains one of the most-bought science-fiction novels in the US, and a new deluxe edition is now selling alongside the original. It is not hard to see why it keeps finding readers. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he is or why he has been sent. Slowly, he works out that the sun is losing energy, Earth faces catastrophe, and his mission may be the planet's last chance.

Weir's great skill, first shown in The Martian, is turning problem-solving into genuine suspense. Every chapter hands Grace a fresh technical puzzle, and his solutions rely on experiments, quick arithmetic and a stubborn refusal to give up. Flashbacks to his life on Earth gradually explain how a middle-school science teacher ended up on a one-way trip, and the drip-feed of revelations is cleverly paced so that the past and present storylines keep raising the stakes for each other.

The tone is generous and funny without undercutting the danger, and the science is explained in plain language that never talks down to the reader. There are surprises along the way that are best discovered fresh, so we will say only that the book becomes far more than a survival story. For newcomers this is an ideal entry point to modern science fiction; for returning fans, the deluxe edition is a fine excuse for a reread.

More than a decade after it first appeared, Red Rising is back near the top of the US science-fiction charts, a sign of how many new readers continue to discover Pierce Brown's series. Darrow is a Red, a young miner working far beneath the surface of Mars in a society divided into rigid, colour-coded castes. He believes his dangerous labour is helping to make the planet habitable for future generations, until a series of shattering events reveals how badly his people have been deceived.

From there the novel becomes a story of infiltration and revenge. Darrow is remade so that he can pass among the ruling Golds, and he enters the merciless training ground where their future leaders are tested. Alliances form and collapse, loyalties are bought and broken, and Darrow has to decide how much of himself he is willing to give up in order to win.

Brown writes with tremendous momentum. Chapters are short and punchy, the action is vivid, and the political scheming is as gripping as the fights. The world draws on Roman history, Greek myth and classic dystopian fiction, yet the voice feels fresh and confident throughout. It is a violent book and some readers will find its intensity a lot to take, but those who enjoyed The Hunger Games or Ender's Game and want something darker and more sprawling will find plenty here. With several sequels already available, it is an easy series to fall into for the winter.

Some books sell on their premise alone, and this one has a premise built for the age of the screenshot. Sloane is added by mistake to a stranger's family group chat. Rather than leaving, she stays for the drama, the memes and a grandmother called Ruth who steals every thread. Then she discovers that the family are wolf shifters, and that she has fallen for the eldest son anyway.

Roxie Ray is one of the most prolific names in paranormal romance, and this new collaboration with Lindsey Devin went straight into the top tier of Amazon's Kindle charts within a fortnight of its October release. As we went to press it was No. 3 in the entire US Kindle Store and No. 2 in Romance, a remarkable showing for a book only weeks old.

The appeal is easy to see. The group-chat framing gives the opening a breezy, comic energy, and the found-family warmth is as much of a draw as the romance. Reader reviews also point to more emotional weight than the title suggests, citing themes of neglect and healing that give the story some substance under the jokes.

Calibrate your expectations, though. This is a long, trope-forward shifter romance with moderate heat, and it is written for readers who already enjoy the genre's conventions: fated bonds, protective heroes and a big, meddling pack. If that sounds like your idea of comfort reading, it is one of the most purely enjoyable surprise hits of the autumn. If not, the title will tell you everything you need to know.

Few fantasy series have travelled as far as Penn Cole's Kindred's Curse Saga. The first three books appeared in 2023, and Atria now publishes the print editions in North America. Burn of the Everflame, the fourth and final volume, arrived in September and is still sitting high in Amazon's US romantasy chart almost two months later. That kind of staying power is the clearest sign of a readership built book by book rather than bought.

The setup for the finale is suitably epic. War has engulfed Emarion. Ophiucae's mortal army is gathering in the north, a long-planned rebellion is stirring in the south, and the Crowns of the realms must try to forge an alliance in Lumnos. At the centre, as ever, is the healer Diem Bellator, whose fight against oppression has carried the series from the start.

Cole's strengths are the ones fans will expect: a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance, an inventive magic system, dragon-like creatures and banter that cuts through the bleaker stretches. The scale is the real ambition here. At around 880 pages in hardcover, this is a book that wants to settle every thread, and readers who like their endings unhurried will relish it.

It is not a jumping-on point. Without three books of politics and betrayals behind you, much of the emotional weight will be lost, so newcomers should start with Spark of the Everflame. For readers who have come this far, it is the big, generous send-off the series has been building towards.

Scottish folklore has given fantasy plenty of kelpies and selkies, but far fewer writers have turned to the bean nighe, the washerwoman seen at the river scrubbing the grave clothes of those about to die. Megan Shade builds her gothic romantasy around that figure, and the choice gives the book an atmosphere that stands out on a crowded shelf.

Bea has haunted the River's End for more than a century, cursed to wash the bloodstained garments of the dying while searching them for fragments of a spell that might let her rest. Brennen arrives as her guard, carrying a vow of vengeance against the monster he believes killed the woman he loved. When women across the kingdom begin to vanish, the two are forced into an uneasy alliance.

What lifts this above a familiar enemies-to-lovers setup is its texture. The river, the rune magic and the sense of a legend told from the wrong side give the story real mood, and Shade is careful to let Bea's loneliness carry as much weight as the romance. The slow burn is genuinely slow, which will delight readers who prize yearning and frustrate those who want momentum from the first chapter.

The numbers say this has found its audience. When we checked Amazon's US charts, the Kindle edition was No. 4 in the entire Kindle Store, ahead of Fourth Wing, and the paperback was No. 1 in Gothic Fiction. For readers who loved The Knight and the Moth or One Dark Window, it is the discovery of the season, and the start of a series worth following.

The murder-puzzle boom we flagged last week has a new front-runner. Iris Starling's The Killer Isn't Alice first appeared in February 2026. After a 16-way auction in the UK, reported by The Bookseller, and a Little, Brown deal in the US, a revised edition is now on both sides of the Atlantic. It is No. 4 across all books on Amazon UK and No. 4 on Publishers Weekly's trade paperback list.

The hook is in the subtitle: 46,600 suspects and one killer. Alice Starling is missing, and in her apartment the police find a dead body, a cryptic note and a folder of names. Alice protests her innocence and leaves you 18 clues. Your job is to work through the list methodically, eliminating everyone who fails to fit, until a single name satisfies every condition.

Where Murdle and Murdoku offer dozens of bite-sized cases, this is one sustained investigation. That makes it feel closer to an escape room in book form, a project to return to over several evenings rather than a quick puzzle on the train. The revised edition adds updated graphics, a new culprit and a bonus puzzle, so owners of the original are not simply buying the same book twice.

Its narrative is thin by design: the story exists to frame the deduction. Readers who want characters and atmosphere should stick with conventional crime fiction. But for anyone who loves the logic of a whodunnit, it is an ingenious, absorbing challenge, and it makes an obvious Christmas present for the puzzler who has everything.

Satire about publishing has become a genre of its own since Yellowface, and Josh Silver's adult debut is one of its sharpest entries. It comes from Crooked Lane Books, an independent house better known for crime fiction, and it has quietly become a word-of-mouth hit: eight weeks on Publishers Weekly's trade paperback list and counting.

Mallory Maddox was once a literary sensation. Seven years of writer's block later, she is desperate for a comeback. Then she meets Leo, a young gay man living rough and battling addiction, and recognises in his life exactly the story she needs. The novel follows what happens when one person decides another's suffering is raw material, and Silver keeps the reader complicit, uncomfortable and often laughing.

The early reviews suggest the balancing act works. Publishers Weekly's starred review praises how much sympathy Silver generates for his badly behaved leads, and the New York Times called it funny and nasty. That mix of cruelty and tenderness is the book's signature. Mallory is monstrous but never a cartoon, and Leo is far more than a victim.

Readers should know that the novel deals frankly with addiction, homelessness and sex work, and its humour is pitch-black. The thriller elements serve the satire rather than the other way round, so anyone expecting a conventional twisty page-turner may be wrong-footed. For readers who enjoy fiction that skewers the culture industry while asking who gets to tell whose story, this is one of the year's most provocative independent-press successes.

If one book sums up how far reader enthusiasm can carry a series, it is this one. Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl first appeared in 2020. Ace now publishes the print editions, and six years on the first volume is No. 2 on Publishers Weekly's trade paperback list after 43 weeks, and No. 8 in Amazon's entire US Kindle Store. Every one of the eight main series novels was in Amazon's US fantasy top 20 when we checked.

The premise is gleefully absurd. Aliens collapse every human-made structure on Earth into a vast, trap-filled dungeon that doubles as an intergalactic reality show. Survival depends less on strength than on keeping the viewers entertained. Carl, a Coast Guard veteran, enters it alongside his ex-girlfriend's prize-winning show cat, Princess Donut, who turns out to be the breakout star.

It is the leading edge of LitRPG, a genre in which characters level up, gain skills and loot as if inside a video game. Dinniman uses the mechanics for comedy and for satire of spectacle-hungry media. Beneath the exploding goblins and drug-dealing llamas there is real anger and real grief, and that emotional undertow is why readers who would never call themselves gamers keep going.

It is crude, violent and sometimes exhausting in its energy, and the game-system notifications will not suit everyone. But it is also very funny and surprisingly humane. As an introduction to the fastest-rising corner of fantasy, nothing beats it.

Theo of Golden is the publishing story of the past two years. Allen Levi's novel first appeared in 2023, spread by recommendation, and was taken on by Simon & Schuster's Atria in autumn 2025. The publisher reported more than a million copies sold in the US by March 2026. A year after the Atria edition appeared, it is still No. 5 across all books on Amazon US and No. 1 in literary fiction.

The premise is disarmingly simple. A stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. At the local coffeehouse, pencil portraits of townspeople hang on the walls, and Theo begins buying them one at a time, giving each portrait to the person it depicts. In return he asks only for their story. Portrait by portrait, regrets surface, secrets are shared and ordinary lives shift.

The book's power lies in its patience. Levi is interested in attention as a moral act: what it means to see someone properly, and how rarely it happens. The structure, a chain of encounters rather than a driving plot, lets him build a quiet mosaic of a community, and the cumulative effect is unexpectedly moving.

It will not be for everyone. Readers who want conflict, irony or narrative tension may find its gentleness too earnest, and its warmth is unapologetic. But in a market dominated by thrillers and high-concept fantasy, its success says something hopeful about what readers are hungry for. For book clubs, and for anyone in need of a story about kindness that does not feel saccharine, it remains an easy recommendation.

One of the more striking features of Amazon's US chart this week is how much space it gives to preparedness. Survival and self-reliance guides hold four places in the top 20, and the highest of them, at No. 2 across all books, is this practical manual from Joel Lambert. According to its publisher, Lambert is a former Navy SEAL and BUD/S instructor.

The premise is right there in the title. Rather than the bug-out bag and wilderness escape that dominate survival culture, Lambert argues for making your own home the safest place to ride out a crisis. The book covers emergency preparedness, home security, essential supplies and practical tactics, and its focus on the home makes it a natural fit for ordinary households, not only committed preppers.

That framing is probably the key to its success. Staying put is the realistic option for most families during a storm, power cut or other emergency, and a book that treats a house and its contents as the first line of defence is more useful to most readers than advice about surviving in the woods. A military background gives the advice authority, though, like any guide in this field, it is a starting point rather than a substitute for official local emergency guidance.

It comes from Global Brother, a small independent publisher, and it is two years old, so its climb to the top of the chart says as much about the national mood as about the book itself. Read it as a sensible, practical checklist and it should earn its place on the shelf. Treat it as a cure for anxiety and it may disappoint.

Freida McFadden has become one of the defining thriller brands of the decade, and The Witch shows her stretching in a new direction. Only her second hardcover original, it nudges her twist-driven domestic suspense towards the gothic. After three weeks on the US hardcover chart it has slipped from the top to No. 7 on Publishers Weekly's list, but the ebook is now No. 2 in Amazon's entire US Kindle Store and No. 1 in its mystery and thriller chart. In the UK it is No. 6 in the Kindle chart.

Julia Barlow, out of a job and an apartment, retreats to Pemberton, her family's seventeenth-century estate in rural Massachusetts, ostensibly to look after her ageing grandmother. Then the grandfather clock starts stopping at 3:41 every morning, the lights flicker and a voice cries for help outside her door. Digging into the house's history leads her to a woman executed for witchcraft in 1692.

The dual timeline is the book's main attraction, and the historical strand gives it more texture than some of McFadden's recent work. Booklist praised its "breathtaking twin climaxes". Whether the haunting is real is a question the novel keeps deliberately open, and we will not answer it here.

As always with McFadden, character depth comes second to momentum. Short chapters and a steady supply of reveals are the point, and readers who find her twists mechanical are unlikely to be converted. For her many fans, though, and for anyone wanting a quick, atmospheric read for the darker evenings, it delivers exactly what it promises.

Murdoku is the book that turned murder-mystery logic puzzles from a novelty into a chart force, and a week after our launch edition it is still climbing. It has risen to No. 5 across all books on Amazon UK, it is No. 13 on Amazon US, and it has spent 30 weeks on Publishers Weekly's trade paperback list, where it reached No. 1 in late October. Its sequel, Back in Time, and newer rivals such as The Killer Isn't Alice are now charting alongside it, which tells you how big this corner of the market has become.

The concept is elegant. Each of the 80 puzzles is a small illustrated crime scene laid out on a grid. As in sudoku, every suspect must sit in exactly one row and one column, but the rooms, furniture and objects in the illustration also carry clues. Place everyone correctly and the killer is revealed. Difficulty rises from gentle to fiendish, so it works for casual solvers and seasoned puzzlers alike.

What makes it so appealing is the way it distils the most satisfying part of a detective story, the moment the pieces click, into a quarter of an hour. It is screen-free, easy to share and works across generations, which is why it is thriving as Christmas approaches.

Readers looking for narrative will find little here: the crimes are scenarios, not stories. And committed logic fans may find the early puzzles too easy. But as an introduction to the trend, or a stocking filler for a crime fan, it remains the benchmark the rest of the genre is measured against.

Every boom needs an originator, and in the murder-puzzle craze that is G. T. Karber's Murdle. First published in 2023, it is enjoying a remarkable late surge: No. 10 across all books on Amazon US for the St. Martin's Griffin edition and No. 17 on Amazon UK for the Souvenir Press edition when we checked. Karber's latest spin-off, Murdle Heist, has also joined Publishers Weekly's trade paperback list. Few puzzle books manage that kind of longevity, let alone a second wind three years after release.

The format crosses Cluedo with a classic logic grid. Each case gives you a cast of suspects, a set of weapons and locations, and a handful of clues and statements. You work out who did it, with what and where, by elimination, much as a golden-age detective would. Karber wraps the logic in a recurring cast of eccentric characters and a running detective persona, so the book reads almost like a collection of very short, very interactive mysteries.

The difficulty curve is well judged. Early cases teach the method gently, and later ones introduce lying suspects and layered deductions that demand real concentration. The humour, all puns and absurd names, keeps the tone light even when the logic gets knotty.

Readers who find logic grids tedious will not be converted, and a hundred cases built on the same engine can feel repetitive if solved in one sitting. Taken a case or two at a time, though, it is a delight. It remains the best entry point to the genre, and its renewed success suggests the boom is broadening rather than fading.