Tag / Goodreads Choice Awards

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Book 19 (of 52) – The Widow

The Widow – John Grisham

A small-town lawyer in Virgina thinks he has hit the jackpot: a rich client with no family looking to prepare a will.  When she then dies suddenly, an autopsy shows she was poisoned and that will, which looked like a godsend to the financially struggling lawyer, now acts as a motive for murder.  When he is convicted of the crime despite a distinct lack of non-circumstantial evidence, he goes on the offensive, looking for the real killer before he reports to prison.

The Widow, the latest from John Grisham, was a 2025 nominee for Favorite Mystery & Thriller in the Goodreads Choice awards.  This was a small change of pace from Grisham, adding a who-done-it mystery to his usual legal thriller genre.  I’ve been reading Grisham’s work for well over 30 years now, albeit with a few fallow years along the way, so a little variety in approach is not a bad thing.

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Book 17 (of 52) – Gone Before Goodbye

Gone Before Goodbye – Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben

When a disgraced surgeon is offered the opportunity to operate again, while clearing all of her family’s debts and pending lawsuits at the same time, she jumps at the chance.  Flown to Russia, she completes the work on both of her patients but then feels like something isn’t right.  Barely escaping with her life, she is taken to Dubai, where she teams with a secret girlfriend of her missing colleague to try and find him and find out what really happened when her husband was murdered.

Actress Reese Witherspoon teams with prolific author Harlan Coben for Gone Before Goodbye, their first collaboration and nominee for the 2026 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller.  Having never read anything from either one before, it is hard to tell how much input Witherspoon had on the finished product.  It was a quick, if somewhat muddled, read, having the bones of a good story but dropping some of the execution.  While this could have been a good introduction to Coben and his many works, I don’t really feel the need to seek out more from him at the moment.

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Book 15 (of 52) – The Woman In Cabin 10

The Woman In Cabin 10 – Ruth Ware

Travel journalist Lo Blacklock has the chance to boost her career when she’s asked to cover the launch of a luxury cruise through Scandinavian waters in place of a pregnant co-worker.  On the first night, drunk and suffering from a lack of sleep due to a recent home invasion and burglary, she believes she witnesses a woman being thrown overboard from the next cabin next over, but, when she reports it, the crew insists all passengers and staff are accounted for.  Despite warnings to back off, she continues to dig, unsure of whom to trust or how to escape, until she becomes the next to disappear.

Nominated for a 2016 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller, Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 was a rare miss from the author I’ve now read five times.  I might have enjoyed this better had I not seen the movie version this past December, but instead it felt like a rehash of a story I already knew, which is surprising since normally I enjoy going back and reading the source material after having seen the movie adaptation.  It has also been a decade since this was first released, so maybe Ware has grown as a writer in that time.  Either way, she recently released a sequel, so maybe I’ll have to give that a try before it gets adapted and see if that makes a difference.

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Book 13 (of 52) – Not Quite Dead Yet

Not Quite Dead Yet – Holly Jackson

When Jet Mason is violently attacked on Halloween night, she barely survives but has a ticking time bomb in her brain that will kill her within a week.  Rather than risking a surgery she likely wouldn’t survive anyway, she decides to spend her remaining time trying to find out who attacked her and why.  Staying with her childhood best friend, she starts investigating, uncovering family secrets involving her parents, her brother and sister-in-law, and her long-dead sister.  When she dies without learning the truth, her friend puts the final pieces together to find out the truth.

Winner of the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery and Thriller, Holly Jackson’s Not Quite Dead Yet puts a unique spin on the genre in her first novel intended for adults.  While searching for her “killer” is the main motivation of the Jet character, she learns more about herself during the investigation than she bargained for, finding how the choices she’s made, in the wake of her sister’s death, led her to where she is in the present and the regrets she will have now that time is no longer an unlimited resource.  I enjoyed this enough to keep an eye on Jackson’s back catalog and for any future output.

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Book 12 (of 52) – The Book Of Lost Hours

The Book of Lost Hours – Hayley Gelfuso

As the Nazis rise to power in Germany leading up to World War II, a young girl is stranded in the time space, a vast library where the memories of the dead are bound into books.  As she grows older, she finds soldiers from different countries entering the time space to destroy certain memories, changing the collective reality along the way.  When she starts to interfere, she becomes a target, eventually getting pulled out and forced to work for the CIA in order to protect the man she loves and their secret child.

The Book of Lost Hours, the debut novel from Hayley Gelfuso, was a nominee for Favorite Science Fiction in the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards and was a Good Morning America book club pick.  This was a fine debut from Gelfuso, who covers some of the same ground as Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library while tackling the role that government, both ours and others, plays in shaping what we eventually come to think of as history.  I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for whatever she comes up with next.

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Book 10 (of 52) – Rock Paper Scissors

Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney

When Adam, a face-blind screenwriter, and Amelia, his long-suffering wife, win a weekend away at a remote Scottish home, it sounds like an opportunity for both of them to decide if they want to continue in the marriage or to finally move on.  Very quickly, however, they learn that things are not quite what they seem and their trip may not have been the prize they thought it was.  Will a third person staying on the property help bring the secrets of their marriage to the forefront?  And, if so, will they survive it?

Alice Feeney’s Rock Paper Scissors was 2021 nominee for Favorite Mystery & Thriller in the Goodreads Choice awards.  I wasn’t planning on dipping my toe back in to Feeney’s work so quickly, but good word of mouth and a quick delivery from the library pushed my hand.  The twist here was similar to her other book that I read, but I did end up liking this one a little better.  It was still kind of farfetched, but I’m glad I went for it.

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Book 8 (of 52) – Don’t Let Him In

Don’t Let Him In – Lisa Jewell

When a mysterious new man enters her mother’s life too quickly following her father’s death, Ash gets a bad feeling in her gut.  The more she digs, the more she realizes that this man, who claimed to be an old acquaintance of her father, is not quite what he seems, despite having ready answers for any of her probing questions or concerns.  A deeper dive leads her to the truth. and the scores of women he has scammed and families he has abandoned over the years.

Lisa Jewell’s latest, Don’t Let Him In, was a 2025 nominee for the Goodreads Choice award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller, which is somewhat surprising since there isn’t much of a mystery here and the thrills are rather light as well.  It is obvious fairly quickly that the men with the different names making time with the different women are all the same man and, once the jealousy was first introduced, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn what role he played in the death of the protagonist’s father, which kicked the whole story into motion.  I was more in tune with the previous work of hers I had read, so hopefully this was more of a blip in the road.

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Book 7 (of 52) – The Secret Of Secrets

The Secret of Secrets – Dan Brown

Symbologist Robert Langdon is in Prague along with his new love Katherine Solomon, a prominent scientist about to publish a ground-breaking new book on the nature of human consciousness.  A brutal murder and an overzealous police officer turn the trip into chaos at the same time that digital copies of Katherine’s manuscript start to disappear.  Can Langdon and Solomon stay one step of the CIA and figure out why she, and her work, are being targeted before they both are silenced permanently?

The Secret of Secrets is the sixth work featuring Robert Langdon from best-selling author Dan Brown.  Nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller, Brown’s latest doesn’t break much new ground when it comes to Langdon and his adventures, aside from giving him a love interest, but does tackle some interesting theories about consciousness and the human brain.  I have no idea how much of that was based in real science and how much was fiction, but if even some of it was real, we are headed towards some amazing breakthroughs in understanding the human condition.

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Book 4 (of 52) – The Impossible Fortune

Richard Osman – The Impossible Fortune

After a quiet year as Elizabeth mourns the loss of her husband, the Thursday Murder Club reconvenes when the best man from Joyce’s daughter’s wedding goes missing.  With over a quarter of a billion pounds at stake, can the crew of pensioners find out who is trying to kill him before the money disappears?

Richard Osman returns with The Impossible Fortune, the latest entry in his Thursday Murder Club series and a nominee for Favorite Mystery & Thriller in last year’s Goodreads Choice Awards.  It has been two years since I read the previous entry, but it felt like no time had passed at all and that I was meeting up with old friends.  I’m not sure what is next from him, but I look forward to whatever it is.

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Book 2 (of 52) – The Perfect Divorce

The Perfect Divorce – Jeneva Rose

After learning that her husband was having an affair, attorney Sarah Morgan decides it is time to end their marriage.  He, however, has other plans and, considering what he knows about the end of Sarah’s first marriage, the two are in for a fight.  Things get messy when the murder case against Sarah’s first husband, who has already been executed, is re-opened after new evidence shows a potential cover-up by the sheriff’s department and two women connected to her current husband go missing.  Which fighting spouse will keep the upper hand in their battle for custody of their daughter?

The Perfect Divorce, my second foray into Jeneva Rose’s work, came to my attention after being nominated for the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller.  It is the second entry in her Perfect series featuring the Sarah Morgan and, I fear, completely spoils the first one.  Aside from that unfortunate outcome, this was a quick and entertaining read, with a completely different vibe from my previous exposure to Rose and her work.  I look forward to revisiting her back catalog in the future.