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End-of-the-Year Contest 2025

Congratulations to the winners of our 2025 End-of-the-Year contest! One reader received all 42 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2025, while seven others won six of these titles.

You can see all the winners below, along with 2025's Bets On selections.

If you would like to know more about these books, be sure to check out this video and podcast where Carol talks about each of her 42 picks.

Week of August 3, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of August 3rd include John Grisham's first-ever whodunit, THE WIDOW, in which a small-time lawyer accused of murder races to find the real killer to clear his name; THE ELEVENTH HOUR by Salman Rushdie, a spellbinding exploration of life, death and what comes into focus at the proverbial 11th hour of life; Philippa Gregory's BOLEYN TRAITOR, a dazzling historical novel of ambition, betrayal and survival in the court of Henry VIII; THE BREAK-IN by Katherine Faulkner, a gripping domestic thriller in which a wealthy London mother must unravel a terrifying mystery filled with twists and turns after killing an intruder in self-defense; and FLESH, David Szalay's Booker Prize-winning novel about a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances.

Katherine Faulkner, author of The Break-In

Alice, a professional mother of one, is hosting a playdate with friends at her upscale London home when a disturbed man breaks in. With her child in the next room, Alice panics and kills him --- an act later ruled to have been in self-defense. Everyone tries to encourage Alice to move on with her life. But with strange comments appearing online, a mysterious phone call telling her all is not as it seems, and her husband, nanny and friends behaving strangely, Alice finds herself drawn to the mystery of who her intruder really was. As she digs deeper, she discovers a trail of dark secrets that spiral closer to home than she ever could have imagined.

The Break-In by Katherine Faulkner

October 2025

Katherine Faulkner writes such twisty domestic thrillers. I loved GREENWICH PARK and THE OTHER MOTHERS, so I was eager to read THE BREAK-IN, which takes the genre to a whole new level.

On a July evening, Alice Rathbone is hosting her friends, Yas and Stella, at her house as she has accepted a new job as an art restorer. Each of them has a young daughter, and the girls are playing in a room with Becca, the nanny whom Alice employs. This quiet evening is interrupted when a young man who is not in possession of all of his faculties bursts through the basement door and asks, “Where is he?” He lashes out at Alice, calling her a liar, reaches for a kitchen knife, and heads to the room where the children are.

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