Skip to main content

Features

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 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.

Joseph Finder, author of The Oligarch's Daughter

Paul Brightman is a man on the run, living under an assumed name in a small New England town with a million-dollar bounty on his head. When his security is breached, Paul is forced to flee into the New Hampshire wilderness to evade Russian operatives who seemingly can predict his every move. Six years ago, Paul was a rising star on Wall Street who fell in love with a beautiful photographer named Tatyana --- unaware that her father was a Russian oligarch and the object of considerable interest from several U.S. intelligence agencies. Now, to save his own life, Paul must unravel a decades-old conspiracy that extends to the highest reaches of the government.

The Oligarch's Daughter by Joseph Finder

February 2025

THE OLIGARCH’S DAUGHTER by Joseph Finder is the kind of thriller that has you racing to read the pages.

The book opens with a young man working on a sailboat. Suddenly he realizes that the carefully devised cover that he has built for himself over the past years has been blown --- and he has been found by one of the Russians from whom he has been running. He quickly grabs his go bag with cash and survival gear, including a burner phone, and heads into the woods. He is armed with his wits and the skills he honed as a child with his father, who loved living off the grid. Readers head on the run with him as the henchmen who have been called out to catch him are close on his tail.