Skip to main content

Features

End-of-the-Year Contest 2022

Congratulations to the winners of our 2022 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 40 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2022, while eight others won a selection of five of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2022's Bets On books.

Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Good Son

Thea's son, Stefan, was just 17 when he went to prison for the drug-fueled murder of his girlfriend, Belinda. Three years later, he’s released to a world that refuses to let him move on. Belinda’s mother, once Thea’s good friend, galvanizes the community to rally against him to protest in her daughter’s memory. The media paints Stefan as a symbol of white privilege and indifferent justice. Neighbors, employers, even some members of Thea's own family turn away. Meanwhile, Thea struggles to understand her son. As his efforts to make amends meet escalating resistance and threats, Thea suspects more forces are at play than just community outrage. And if there is so much she never knew about her own son, what other secrets has she yet to uncover --- especially about the night Belinda died?

The Good Son by Jacquelyn Mitchard

March 2022

In THE GOOD SON, Jacquelyn Mitchard opens the book with Thea Demetriou at the prison gates waiting to pick up her son, Stefan, as he is released from prison. It’s a brilliant “cold open” with this line: “I was picking my son up at the prison gates when I spotted the mother of the girl he had murdered.” And she goes on to say, “Two independent clauses, ten words each, joined by an adverb, made up entirely of words that would once have been unimaginable to think, much less say.”

Week of March 20, 2023

Paperback releases for the week of March 20th include Amor Towles' THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America spanning just 10 days and told from multiple points of view; THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME by Laura Dave, a gripping mystery about a woman who thinks she has found the love of her life --- until he disappears; THE GOOD SON, Jacquelyn Mitchard's powerful, emotionally charged novel of family, redemption and a mother’s love; A SUNLIT WEAPON, in which a series of possible attacks on British pilots leads Jacqueline Winspear's beloved heroine, Maisie Dobbs, into a mystery involving First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; THE SHOP ON ROYAL STREET, the first book in a spinoff series of Karen White's Tradd Street novels, which finds Nola Trenholm hopeful for a fresh start in the Big Easy but must deal with ghosts from her past --- as well as new ones; and THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED, John Green's open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.