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Summer Reading 2025

All summer long, we at Bookreporter.com have been sharing some great summer book picks with our Summer Reading Feature. While our series of 24-hour contests have ended, we encourage you to take a look at our featured titles for some sizzling summer reading ideas.

» Click here to see the winners of this year's Summer Reading contests.

Sarah Pekkanen, author of The Locked Ward

It’s the Crime of the Decade when glamorous Georgia Cartwright, who was adopted as a newborn, is accused of killing the biological daughter of her wealthy, Southern family. Georgia is locked in a psychiatric institution where the most violent offenders are held while she awaits trial. The only words she whispers when her estranged twin sister, Amanda, visits are “I didn’t do it. You’ve got to get me out of here.” Amanda doesn't trust Georgia, but she can't abandon her in a place so eerie and menacing that it seems to exist in another dimension. Is Georgia the victim of a powerful family that's so depraved murder is the least of their crimes? Or is Amanda being led down a path of madness into the web of a master manipulator?

Week of July 13, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of July 13th include WE ARE ALL GUILTY HERE, the first thrilling mystery in Karin Slaughter's North Falls series, which our reviewer Ray Palen says “hits hard enough to take the breath out of you and leaves behind indelible images of depravity that are difficult to shake”; THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS by Ocean Vuong, a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive; Rebecca Armitage's THE HEIR APPARENTan irresistible modern fairy tale about a British princess who must decide between her duty to her family --- or to her own heart; and THE MOTHER NEXT DOOR by Andrea Dunlop (the host and creator of the award-winning true crime podcast “Nobody Should Believe Me”) and Mike Weber,   a groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that investigates Munchausen by proxy.