My Favorite Reads, Fall 2025

 My favorite reads from the fourth quarter of 2025.

 Notice I don’t say the “best” books I read over the past three months; these are my favorites. My ego is not such that I am willing to pronounce anything as “best,” which is a consensus thing.

 At best.

 The Black Echo, Michael Connelly. The first Bosch novel and not as fluidly written as later books would be, The Black Echo still has all the elements Connelly’s loyal readers came to love. If you’re a Harry Bosch fan and wonder how things got started, look this one up.

 Wolf Tickets, Ray Banks. A re-read I enjoyed just as much as the first time. Banks is one of those writers who makes you forget you’re reading; the book flows as if these two guys are telling you their stories. Using multiple first-person POVs can seem gimmicky, but Banks makes it seem like you’re coming across each of them in a bar on alternate nights. This is the book that set the Ray Banks hook in me.

 True Target, Austin Camacho. I don’t typically care for hit man protagonists but I’m a devotee of Camacho’s Hannibal Jones series, so I gave this one a try. I think I still prefer Jones – after all, he’s a PI and I’m a PI guy – but Skye is a protagonist who can carry a series. The story is never predictable but always makes sense, and Skye has aspects to her character – including her pronoun – that makes this not just another hit man novel.

 Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell. I re-read this a couple of weeks before we lost Woodrell, so how great was out loss was fresh in my mind. A beautifully written book where the writing never draws attention to itself to interfere with the story or characterization, by which I mean Woodrell never succumbed to striving for the ‘sentence beautiful;’ telling stories in a gripping and evocative manner was how he naturally wrote. I think I’ve read all his novels now and I’ll continue to come back every year or so to remind me of his extraordinary talent.

 Not Born of Woman, Teel James Glenn. Frankenstein’s creature returns from the Arctic to work as a private investigator in pre-World War Two New York. Glenn’s writing evokes Mary Shelley’s voice while still giving Adam Paradise license to tell the story in his own way. Paradise has both gifts and limitations mere humans lack but none strain credulity once you accept the initial premise. This book deserves all the acclaim it has received.

 The Blooding, Joseph Wambaugh. Speaking of extraordinary talents, this non-fiction effort by another giant we lost this year shows his off on multiple levels. Though he was the greatest writer of police procedurals ever – rivaled only by Ed McBain – Wambaugh’s non-fiction is even better. Here he examines in detail two gruesome murders in an English village in the mid-1980s that led to the first instance of identifying a killer through genetic fingerprinting. Alternately funny and painful to read, The Blooding left me sitting quietly for several minutes after I finished it; I took a couple of days off from reading when I was done.