Weiner, Jennifer. The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits.

NY: Morrow, 2025.

This author has published close to twenty novels and I’ve read at least half of them over the years. All of them have been at least pretty good, but this one is easily her best yet. One of the two or three best of the more than eighty books I’ve read this year, in fact. I’ve been reading more or less professionally for a long time now and I seldom react emotionally to even a really good book any longer, but I’m not embarrassed to admit that this one actually choked me up a few times. It’s just that kind of story.

Denholm, Blair. Kill Shot.

Np: Vinci Books, 2020.

The protagonist — he’s way to iffy to call him a hero — of this police procedural mystery set in the topical north of Queensland, Australia, is Detective Sergeant Jack Lisbon, late of the Metropolitan Police back in London. And his tendency a few years before to act without thinking about consequences is the reason why he’s now not-quite hiding out on the other side of the planet. But he has taken himself in hand since then — mostly — in a desperate bid to rescue his career, even though his persistent reckless instincts mean his fists frequently take precedence over his good sense.

Albertalli, Becky. Amelia, If Only.

NY: HarperCollins, 2025.

When it comes to portraying the experiences, relationships, and problems of LGBT young people in the 21st-century world, Becky is simply one of the best there is. This is her ninth novel since breaking out with the bestselling Simon and the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and it certainly maintains her high standard with its skillful mix of dry humor, authentic banter, and serious life issues. And I will note that if you’ve read Imogen, Obviously (and you should have), the protagonist, Amelia Appelbaum, lives in the same upper Hudson River Valley universe.

Pronko, Michael. The Last Train.

Np: Gravel Pres, 2022.

This is the first police procedural murder mystery set in Japan that I’ve read that wasn’t actually written by a Japanese author. I’ve read a lot of these, it’s a favorite fiction niche of mine, and I have to say this one certainly feels very “Japanese.” But there are definite differences, too. Pronko certainly knows Tokyo (he’s lived there for decades), and he understands the Japanese police system (which is both very similar and quite different from the U.S. system, remodeled as it was during McArthur’s postwar occupation), but the detectives in the story have a different feel in this one, especially in their less bureaucracy-bound approach to the job and their more freewheeling methods, which might be closer to the NYPD way of doing things.

Manco, Jean. Ancestral Journeys.

Rev. & Updated Ed. London: Thomas & Hudson, 2015.

I’ve been a history junky all my life, and it started when I was an Army brat in the 1950s, living in and traveling all over Europe. Wandering around the Forum in Rome, actually putting my hands on solid history, and knowing that other people had been doing the very same thing in that very spot for more than twenty-five centuries — that realization hooked me for life. And my growing interest in the far past led me to wonder about things. Like, why were there so many blue-eyed blonde Italians in Milan? (Weren’t Italians supposed to be Mediterranean?) Why do Spaniards in the north of the country seem so different from those in the south? In college, I learned about the long history of human migration, beginning with the slow departure of the species from Africa and on into the many population shifts down through history, and the domino effect of population pressure that resulted in virtually everyone (at least in Europe) having a lot in common biologically with everyone else. I ended up with a couple of degrees in history and I’m still learning.

Scalzi, John. When the Moon Hits Your Eye.

NY: Tor, 2025.

An ancient trope in writing science fiction is to ask the question, “What if?” Or more specifically,  “If this happens, what comes next?” An experienced author thinks “Well, . . .” — and then off he goes, hopefully with interesting results that make a good story. But only John Scalzi would come up with a (ahem . . .) luna-tic what-if like “What if the Moon were actually made of cheese?” So, on one ordinary day, a little before 5:00 p.m. EST, our Moon, heretofore composed of basalt and similar rocky stuff, abruptly becomes  globe of much more reflective white matter. Th director of the John Glenn Museum in Ohio, which owns a moon rock, notices the same change, opens the display, and discovers it smells like . . . cheese. President Brett Boone is informed of the change by his Chief of Staff (in carefully chosen small words) and NASA is driving itself cray. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Johnson, Abigail. Every Time You Go Away.

Don Mills, ONT: Harlequin, 2023.

Abigail Johnson is an always reliable author of high-quality romcoms, and this one is no exception. But in most of her books, while there’s plenty of romance, there often isn’t a lot of comedy. Johnson doesn’t go in for fluff, and that’s true here, as well. Rebecca James has lived in the same house in Arizona nearly all her life, and next door lived Ethan Kelly, “He was my first friend, my first kiss, and the one person I trusted with all my secrets even as he held back so many of his.” The thing is, it was actually his grandparents’ house and Ethan only lived with them intermittently — when his addictive mother periodically felt guilty for dragging her young son around with her, from flophouse to druggie boyfriend to living in their car. And then she would park Ethan with her parents and disappear for a month or two or ten while she made an effort to rehabilitate herself.