Q1:2025 Formal SBR Nominations

[Ashley, The Tipsy Challenger]

1st Quarter Series Buddy Read Nominations!

It's time to dust off those TBR piles and nominate your favorite unread series for our exciting start to 2025!

Important Dates:
📚 Nominations are OPEN December 1st - 15th
🗳️ Voting (via POLL) will be December 16th - 25th
📖 Reading & Discussion will be January 1st - March 31st

Nomination Rules:
1. You can nominate ANY series your heart desires!
2. The series must not have been read by our group before. Check our Past Group Reads to avoid duplicates!
3. We always start with Book 1 and read until the quarter ends.

How to Nominate:
Comment below with your series nomination.
Include the series name, author, and a brief (spoiler-free) pitch to entice voters!

Let the nominations begin, and may the best series win! 📚✨

[Ashley, The Tipsy Challenger]

Nominations:

Bill Hodges Trilogy
The Shadow and Bone Trilogy
A Witch in Wolf Wood Series
Detective Katie Scott Series
Bone Secrets Series

[Angie ☯]

I'll nominate Bill Hodges Trilogy

Genres:
Horror - Thriller - Mystery - Suspense - Crime - Detective


In the predawn hours, in a distressed American city, hundreds of unemployed men and women line up for the opening of a job fair. They are tired and cold and desperate. Emerging from the fog, invisible until it is too late, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.

Months later, an ex-cop named Bill Hodges, still haunted by the unsolved crime, contemplates suicide. When he gets a crazed letter from "the perk," claiming credit for the murders, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, fearing another even more diabolical attack and hell-bent on preventing it.

Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of eccentric and mismatched allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.

Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable. (--front flap)


(view spoiler)[Wake up, genius.

The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn’t published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he’s released from prison after thirty-five years.

Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous. Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life—for good, for bad, forever. (hide spoiler)]


(view spoiler)[(The last book adds these Genres: Paranormal - Fantasy)

The spectacular finale to the New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with Mr. Mercedes (winner of the Edgar Award) and Finders Keepers—In End of Watch, the diabolical “Mercedes Killer” drives his enemies to suicide, and if Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney don’t figure out a way to stop him, they’ll be victims themselves.

In Room 217 of the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, something has awakened. Something evil. Brady Hartsfield, perpetrator of the Mercedes Massacre, where eight people were killed and many more were badly injured, has been in the clinic for five years, in a vegetative state. According to his doctors, anything approaching a complete recovery is unlikely. But behind the drool and stare, Brady is awake, and in possession of deadly new powers that allow him to wreak unimaginable havoc without ever leaving his hospital room.

Retired police detective Bill Hodges, the unlikely hero of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers, now runs an investigation agency with his partner, Holly Gibney—the woman who delivered the blow to Hartsfield’s head that put him on the brain injury ward. When Bill and Holly are called to a suicide scene with ties to the Mercedes Massacre, they find themselves pulled into their most dangerous case yet, one that will put their lives at risk, as well as those of Bill’s heroic young friend Jerome Robinson and his teenage sister, Barbara. Brady Hartsfield is back, and planning revenge not just on Hodges and his friends, but on an entire city.

In End of Watch, Stephen King brings the Hodges trilogy to a sublimely terrifying conclusion, combining the detective fiction of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers with the heart-pounding, supernatural suspense that has been his bestselling trademark. The result is an unnerving look at human vulnerability and chilling suspense. No one does it better than King. (hide spoiler)]

[Ashley, The Tipsy Challenger]

I want to read this series next year, so I'll nominate: The Shadow and Bone Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo

The original fantasy saga from #1 New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo, the Shadow and Bone Trilogy is the story of Alina Starkov, a soldier in the kingdom of Ravka who discovers she possesses magical abilities. Training with the Grisha, her country's magical military elite, Alina falls under the spell of their notorious leader, the Darkling. He believes she is the only one with the power to defeat the forces threatening the kingdom--forces that will test old alliances and challenge the very limits of magic, one that will forge a leader from a frightened girl.

[Erin *Proud Book Hoarder*]

A Witch in Wolf Wood Series

Want to read some of these to finish series out. 5 book series that is finished.



These are also available on Kindle Unlimited

First book:

As a bookish, introverted database programmer, Morgen Keller never thought she was a candidate for a midlife crisis. That was before her husband divorced her, her boss let her go, and her grandmother died. Forty wasn’t supposed to look like this.

When Morgen heads up to the small town of Bellrock, Washington, to settle the estate, she looks forward to taking a peaceful break from life and figuring out what she’s going to do next.

But peace isn’t to be had. The old farmhouse is full of witch paraphernalia, a fearsome werewolf has claimed the property, and contrary to what the family was told, Grandma didn’t die of natural causes.

Embroiled in a mystery, and heir to powers she knew nothing about, Morgen must turn to the only person who might be able to help: the werewolf who threatened to rip her throat out for trespassing.

This isn’t the fresh start on life that Morgen had in mind.

[Kat]

I’ll nominate Jennifer Chase Detective Scott series

It’s detective series so each book is different

This is book one blurb
An eight-year-old girl, Chelsea Compton, is missing in Pine Valley, California and for Detective Katie Scott it’s a cruel reminder of the friend who disappeared from summer camp twenty years ago. Unable to shake the memories, Katie vows she won’t rest until she discovers what happened to Chelsea.

But as Katie starts to investigate—her PTSD flashbacks kept at bay with the help of her loyal ex-military dog, Cisco—the case reveals itself to be much bigger and more shocking than she feared. Deep in the forest, she unearths a makeshift cemetery: a row of graves, each with a brightly coloured teddy bear.

Tracing the silk lining the coffins, Katie links the graves to a stack of missing-persons cases involving young girls—finding a pattern no one else has managed to see. Someone in Pine Valley has been taking the town’s daughters for years, and Katie is the only one who can stop them.

[Erin]

Bone Secrets series by Kendra Elliot . Kendra is one of my favorite authors,

[Ashley, The Tipsy Challenger]

Nominations Closed

[Ashley, The Tipsy Challenger]

1st Quarter Series Buddy Read Poll is UP!

Important Dates:
🗳️ Voting (via POLL) will be December 16th - 25th
📖 Reading & Discussion will be January 1st - March 31st

VOTE HERE!




📢 WE HAVE A TIE!! for the 1st Quarter 2025 Series Buddy Read 🎉

Quick! Head over to the RUN-OFF POLL and VOTE! Poll ends 29-Dec!