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End-of-the-Year Contest 2024

Congratulations to the winners of our 2024 End-of-the-Year contest! One reader received all 40 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2024, while 10 others won four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2024'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 40 picks.

Shari Lapena, author of What Have You Done?

Nothing ever happens in sleepy little Fairhill, Vermont. But this morning that will change. And one innocent question could be deadly. What have you done? The teenagers get their kicks telling ghost stories in the old graveyard. The parents trust that their kids will arrive home safe from school. Everyone knows everyone. Curtains rarely twitch. Front doors are left unlocked. But Diana Brewer isn’t lying safely in her bed where she belongs. Instead she lies in a hayfield, circled by vultures, discovered by a local farmer. How quickly a girl becomes a ghost. How quickly a town of friendly, familiar faces becomes a town of suspects, a place of fear and paranoia. Someone in Fairhill did this. Everyone wants answers.

What Have You Done? by Shari Lapena

August 2024

I am not sure how she does it, but all of Shari Lapena’s books are absolute page-turners. This time I tried to slow myself down to see if I could analyze her method, but once again her propulsive storytelling did not allow this.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? opens in Fairhill, Vermont, where everything is beautiful and bucolic. One morning, a local farmer finds in his field the body of a young woman that is being feasted upon by vultures. For the record, the description of the vultures was enough to get the hair on my arms standing up. Soon the victim is identified as Diana Brewer, a local high school senior, and the chatter starts up about how she got there and who wanted her killed.

Week of June 16, 2025

Paperback releases for the week of June 16th include WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?, an unputdownable thriller from the “queen of the one-sit read,” Shari Lapena, that unravels the secrets of the seemingly peaceful town of Fairhill, Vermont; BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME, Ta-Nehisi Coates' profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about America's racial history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son; NOW OR NEVER, the 31st Stephanie Plum mystery from Janet Evanovich, who has written a staggering 45 New York Times bestsellers over the last three decades; J. Courtney Sullivan's THE CLIFFS, an enthralling novel of family, secrets, ghosts and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine; and BEN & ME, an unconventional biography in which Eric Weiner follows in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin, mining his life for inspiration and practical lessons for living a purposeful and virtuous life.

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