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Winter Reading 2025

At Bookreporter.com, we kicked off 2025 with our 10th annual Winter Reading Contests and Feature. We hosted a series of 24-hour contests spotlighting a book releasing this winter and gave five lucky readers a chance to win it.

Even though our contests have wrapped up, we encourage you to take a look at this year's featured titles, as these are books you will want to read during the winter months --- and into the warmer ones!

Jessie Garcia, author of The Business Trip

Stephanie and Jasmine have nothing and everything in common. The two women don’t know each other but are on the same plane. Stephanie is on a business trip, and Jasmine is fleeing an abusive relationship. After a few days, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man --- the messages becoming stranger and more erratic. And then the two women vanish. The texts go silent, the red flags go up, and the panic sets in. When Stephanie and Jasmine are each declared missing and in danger, it begs the questions: Who is Trent McCarthy? What did he do to these women --- or what did they do to him?

Week of January 19, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of January 19th include NEMESIS, the 10th installment in Gregg Hurwitz's stellar Orphan X series, in which Evan Smoak --- having lived his life by the assassin’s Ten Commandments --- finds himself at odds with his oldest friend in the world; THE OLIGARCH'S DAUGHTER by Joseph Finder, a breakneck thriller that marries the dynastic opulence of "Succession" with the tense and disorienting spycraft of "The Americans"; Eric Puchner's DREAM STATE, an ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence; A FORTY YEAR KISS, an exquisitely written, small-town story from Nickolas Butler about one couple's hard-won second chance at love, 40 years after their divorce; and RAISED BY A SERIAL KILLER by April Balascio, an unforgettable memoir that traces one daughter’s moving quest to understand her larger-than-life childhood as she searches for the truth about her father, the serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards.