Before I dive into the official list, I want to mention a manga and a Japanese novel adaptation, one is a genre blend and the other isn’t officially in the US.
Black Butler
by Yana Toboso returns this month on Crunchyroll and is a blend of action and supernatural, with a vengeance plot. In the new season, the 13-year-old main character and his loyal demon butler leave “the gritty underworld of nineteenth-century England and venture to the south of Germany to investigate a series of mysterious deaths.” (Here’s the Exact Time Black Butler -Emerald Witch Arc- Premieres on Crunchyroll)
The Dinner Table Detective is a Japanese mystery novel series by Tokuya Higashigawa, illustrated by Yūsuke Nakamura, that was adapted into manga by Aya Kawase. In 2011, there was a Japanese television drama adaptation, and now there is an anime adaptation that will play on Japanese network TV, Noitamina, and Steam on Prime in Asia. I do hope that there ends up being an English translation for the books/manga and that the anime finds its way to US streaming! (
The Dinner Table Detective Anime Premieres on April 4)
I will note before going forward that, once again, publishing and studios are continuing to disproportionately focus on white authors, and I couldn’t research my way out of another all white list.
The 1980s novel stars a cryptographer for the CIA whose fiancée gets murdered by terrorists—if you were watching things in the ‘80s/’90s you know the disposable woman/women in refrigerators trope.
The film adaptation elevates the fiancée to wife status before killing her in a terrorist attack in London which spurs her husband, “a brilliant, but deeply introverted decoder for the CIA,” into action. The film hits theaters April 11th and has an excellent cast, including Rami Malek (Mr. Robot), Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Jon Bernthal (The Punisher), Caitriona Balfe (Outlander), and Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix).
This one is for fans of domestic thrillers: a nine-year-old girl is dropped off for a sleepover at a new friend’s house, but when her parents return the following day to pick her up, they discover no one lives in the house and their daughter is gone…
This month’s Sherlock reimagining,
Sherlock & Daughter, is a CW series starring David Thewlis (Fargo) and Blu Hunt (The New Mutants) in which Sherlock has very difficult cases and partners up with a young American, who “learns her missing father may be the legendary detective”.
And finally, I’ll end with the final season for the You series on Netflix. The book and series are for fans of dark, twisty, psychological thrillers that follow the creepy guy.
While the adaptation, starring Penn Badgley, begins pretty faithful to the book series, it definitely veers off, so start from the beginning on either—or both!—and enjoy different surprise twists in each.
How is it that we’re already more than a quarter of the way through 2025? I’m ahead of my reading goals and still feel so far behind at the same time. I’ve packed in plenty of poetry, though, finding lots of wonderful and surprising voices emerging. It’s early, but totally time to check in with some of the best new poetry collections of 2025 so far.
It’s funny how timely these collections are. Keep in mind that publishing moves VERY SLOWLY, so books that have been released in the first quarter of 2025 were probably completed in late 2023 or early 2024, only seeing the light of day recently. So, these collections were written in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. Nevertheless, many of these collections feel like guttural reactions to the world right now. Amazing how prescient art and artists can be, huh?
These poetry collections run the gamut from deeply personal to powerfully political. Let’s face it, those two are often the same anyway, particularly when it comes to poetry. Most exciting to me are how many of these best new poetry collections of 2025 so far are fresh voices to the poetic scene. Let’s dig into those collections, shall we?