Most Anticipated Book Releases February 2025

Title: Deep End

Author: Ali Hazelwood

Description: Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A Junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships—at least, that’s what she tells herself.

Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It’s how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes.

So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water..

I keep adding Ali Hazelwood books to my tbr, 2025 will be the year I finally read one 🙂

Title: The Radio Hour

Author: Victoria Purman

Description: Martha Berry is fifty years old, a spinster, and one of an army of polite and invisible women in 1956 Sydney who go to work each day and get things done without fuss, fanfare or reward.

Working at the country’s national broadcaster, she’s seen highly praised talent come and go over the years but when she is sent to work as a secretary on a brand-new radio serial, created to follow in the footsteps of Australia’s longest running show, Blue Hills, she finds herself at the mercy of an egotistical and erratic young producer without a clue, a conservative broadcaster frightened by the word ‘pregnant’ and a motley cast of actors with ideas of their own about their roles in the show.

When Martha is forced to step in to rescue the serial from impending cancellation, she ends up secretly ghost-writing scripts for As The Sun Sets, creating mayhem with management, and coming up with storylines that resonate with the serial’s growing and loyal audience of women listeners.

But she can’t keep her secret forever and when she’s threatened with exposure, Martha has to decide if she wants to remain in the shadows, or to finally step into the spotlight.

This was previously released in hardcover, but I just found out about it, so I am counting it as a new release.

Title: The Queens of Crime

Author: Marie Benedict

Description: London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second-class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment.

May Daniels, a young English nurse on an excursion to France with her friend, seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later, her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of a crowded train station without anyone noticing? If, as the police believe, the cause of death is manual strangulation, why is there is an extraordinary amount of blood at the crime scene? What is the meaning of a heartbreaking secret letter seeming to implicate an unnamed paramour? Determined to solve the highly publicized murder, the Queens of Crime embark on their own investigation, discovering they’re stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy Sayers herself, threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to keep hidden.

Inspired by a true story in Sayers’ own life, New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict brings to life the lengths to which five talented women writers will go to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of letters as they unpuzzle a mystery torn from the pages of their own novels.

I love books with writers as main characters that are authors. I love historical fiction about real people. This sounds perfect.

Title: You Are Fatally Invited

Author: Ande Pliego

When renowned anonymous author J. R. Alastor hires former aspiring writer Mila del Angél to host a writing retreat at his private manor off the coast of Maine, she jumps at the chance—particularly since she has an ax to grind with one of the invitees. The guest list? Six thriller authors, all masters of deceit, misdirection, and mayhem.

Confess the crimes, survive the tropes.

Alastor and Mila have masterminded a week of games, trope-fueled riddles, and maybe a jump scare or two—the perfect cover for Mila to plot a murder of her own. But when a guest turns up dead—and it’s not the murder she planned—Mila finds herself trapped in a different narrative altogether.

One by one, you’ll lose your turn.

With a storm cutting off the island, and the body count rising, Mila must outwit a killer who knows literally every trick in the book.

Until only one of us remains…

Again, I’ve been really getting into more thrillers and books with authors as the main character.