Bestseller

Brian and Barbara review the book Dirty Thirty by Janet Evanovich, number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction list of November 19, 2023.

Stephanie Plum, Trenton, New Jersey’s most famous fictional detective, is back in her thirtieth adventure, this time trying to apprehend a fugitive who thought a good way to escape the tedium of his assembly line job at the local button factory would be to commit armed robbery of a jewelry store. Can Stephanie track him down and get paid before her rent is due, while dealing with car wrecks, fire-bombings, amorous ex-lovers, an assistant who thinks her apartment is haunted by an ogre—a real ogre—and a golden retriever who remains perpetually hungry no matter how recently, and often, he’s been fed?

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode #18 of bestseller, recorded on 1/6/2024

Brian and Barbara review the book The Exchange by John Grisham, number one on the November 5 and November 12, 2023, New York Times hardcover fiction lists.

Attorney Mitch McDeere, having escaped a mob-corrupted Memphis law firm at the end of author James Grisham’s 1991 breakthrough novel The Firm, resurfaces fifteen years later in Manhattan, now a junior partner in the largest international law firm in the world. Mitch returns to Memphis to seek a reprieve for a convicted killer, then heads overseas to lead a team suing the erratic Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi for failure to pay a billion-dollar construction bill. A young member of Mitch’s team is kidnapped by terrorists, and the pressure on Mitch to get her back builds to the breaking point when his wife Abby is pulled into the ransom negotiations.

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it--or re-gift it!

Episode 17 of bestseller, recorded on 12/31/2023.

Brian and Barbara review the book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, one of the bestselling hardcover fiction books of 2023.

Childhood friends Sadie and Sam meet up again in Boston of the mid-1990s—Sadie an MIT undergrad, Sam at Harvard—and discover they make a great videogame design team. Zevin’s coming of age novel, named to multiple “Top Books of 2022” lists, follows the challenges and triumphs of Sadie and Sam as tech whizzes and as human beings while the world of videogaming evolves through and around them.

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode 16 of bestseller, recorded on 11/28/2023.

Brian and Barbara review the book Holly by Stephen King, number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction lists of September 24 and October 1, 2023.

Private detective Holly Gibney, introduced in King’s Edgar-award winning mystery novel Mr. Mercedes, gets her own book, and her own case: tracking down a pair of octogenarian college professors with an appetite for abduction and murder before they strike again.

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode #15 of bestseller, recorded on 11/10/2023.

Brian and Barbara review the book Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction list of September 3, 2023.

In her ninth novel, award-winning author Ann Patchett builds a story within a story. Secluded on the family’s cherry orchard due to COVID, the Nelson family picks fruit together while listening as their mother, Lara, reveals the full story of her romantic involvement with one of the world’s most famous actors, Peter Duke, who she shared a stage with in a 1980s production of Our Town at a Michigan theater known as Tom Lake.  

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode 14 of bestseller, recorded on 10/7/2023.

Brian and Barbara review Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Demon Copperhead, forty-four weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction list as of September 17, 2023.

In her acclaimed new novel, Kingsolver reimagines the story of David Copperfield, transplanting Dickens’ classic hero from Victorian England to late 1990s Appalachia, where the young Demon struggles to thrive and survive while facing challenges of poverty, prejudice, abuse, neglect, and addiction.     

Episode 13 of bestseller, recorded 9/9/2023. 

Brian and Barbara review the “romantasy” book Fourth Wing, number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction list for six weeks (so far), from July 23 to August 27, 2023.

In the adult fantasy novel blowing up BookTok, romance author Rebecca Yarros introduces us to the world of the Empyrean: dragons, gryphons, magic, and young cadets like Violet Sorrengail managing complicated love lives while fighting the odds (and each other) to claim the honor of riding their own dragon and wielding their own signature powers in defense of an embattled homeland. 

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode 12 of bestseller, recorded on 8/20/2023.

Brian and Barbara review the book The Five-Star Weekend, number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction list from July 2 to July July 16, 2023.

In the latest novel from Elin Hilderbrand, “Queen of the beach read,” beloved food blogger Hollis Shaw gathers four friends from different stages of her life for an impeccably curated getaway weekend on Nantucket, as she seeks to begin rebuilding her life after a tragic family loss. 

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode 11 of bestseller, recorded on 8/13/2023. 

Brian and Barbara review the romantic suspense novel Identity by Nora Roberts, number one selling book on the New York Times hardcover fiction list of June 11, 2023.

Baltimore bartender Morgan Albright's life is turned upside when a psychotic serial killer steals her identity and kills her roommate. Emotionally devastated and financially ruined, Morgan moves back to the Vermont home shared by her mother and grandmother, and painstakingly begins putting the pieces of her life back together--new job, new love interest--while facing the brutal reality that the killer is still out there, waiting for the opportunity to complete his attack on Morgan, the one that got away.

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode 10 of bestseller, recorded on 7/30/2023

Brian and Barbara review the book Only the Dead by Jack Carr, number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction list of June 4, 2023.

The sixth novel in the Terminal List espionage series finds Navy SEAL and CIA operative James Reece locked in a federal supermax prison, accused of organizing the assassination of the President of the United States. His mission, beyond surviving months of solitary confinement, is to figure out who pulled the strings behind his arrest, and to stop them before they carry out plans to sow chaos in a global balance of power already strained by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Twenty minutes with us, and you'll know whether to read it ... or regift it!

Episode 9 of bestseller, recorded on July 24, 2023