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End-of-the-Year Contest 2019

Congratulations to the winners of our 2019 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 52 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2019, while 13 others won a selection of four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2019's Bets On books.

Spring Preview 2019

The arrival of spring signals the end of our Spring Preview contests. Many thanks to all who entered --- and a big congratulations to all our winners! You can see the winners here, and below are the books that we believe you’ll be talking about over the next few months.

Sally Hepworth, author of The Mother-in-Law

From the moment Lucy met her husband’s mother, she knew she wasn’t the wife Diana had envisioned for her perfect son. Exquisitely polite, friendly and always generous, Diana nonetheless kept Lucy at arm’s length despite her desperate attempts to win her over. That was five years ago. Now, Diana is dead, a suicide note found near her body claiming that she longer wanted to live because of the cancer wreaking havoc inside her body. But the autopsy finds no cancer. It does find traces of poison, and evidence of suffocation. Who could possibly want Diana dead?

The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth

May 2019

If you have been reading this website and my Bets On selections for the last few years, you will know that I am a huge fan of Sally Hepworth, an Australian author who writes wonderful thrillers that revolve around home and family. In the first chapter of her latest, THE MOTHER-IN-LAW, we learn that Lucy’s mother-in-law, Diana, is dead. From there, we unpeel the layers of how she died, with the plot twisting this way and that, and lots of finger-pointing from the family.

Week of March 9, 2020

Lisa See's THE ISLAND OF SEA WOMEN is about female friendship and family secrets on a small Korean island. It is an epoch set over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War and its aftermath, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for female divers. Other paperback releases for the week of March 9th include THE MOTHER-IN-LAW by Sally Hepworth, a twisty, compelling novel about one woman's complicated relationship with her mother-in-law that ends in death; THE UNWINDING OF THE MIRACLE, a powerful, honest and inspirational memoir from Julie Yip-Williams, a young mother who, at the age of 37, was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer; and Cara Robertson's THE TRIAL OF LIZZIE BORDEN, which tells the true story of one of the most sensational murder trials in American history, and is based on 20 years of research and recently unearthed evidence.