Our Favorite Mystery and Thriller Books of 2025

Marisa Kashino has hit it out of the park with her debut thriller, infusing Best Offer Wins (publishing November 25) with jolts of dark humor. Thirty-seven-year-old publicist Margo Miyake is desperate to escape the chaos of today’s competitive housing market: She and her husband need to move out of their cramped apartment and into the home of their dreams. When the perfect house is about to go up for sale, Margo leaps into action. She’ll do whatever it takes to ensure that her offer wins — and cross increasingly dangerous lines to make her home-buying dream a reality. 

Bestselling author Alex North is one of the most captivating writers working today, thanks to scary-good supernatural thrillers like The Whisper Man and The Shadows. North’s newest release continues his winning streak. The Man Made of Smoke centers on Dan Garvie, who narrowly escaped a serial killer’s grasp in his youth and now works as a criminal profiler to seek justice for victims. When Dan’s father dies under suspicious circumstances, he returns to his small island community — and the deeper he digs for answers, the more it becomes clear that the monster from his childhood has returned to strike again. North’s serial killer thriller is both emotionally charged and utterly chilling. "A mesmerizing read, best read in a well-lit room" (Booklist, starred review).

Veteran Blue Bloods TV showrunner Kevin Wade knows his way around a riveting narrative, so it’s no surprise that his debut crime novel, Johnny Careless, had us gripped from the first page. The book centers on Police Chief Jeep Mullane, who returns home to head up a small police department on Long Island’s North Shore after his tenure with the NYPD burned him out. The new gig is supposed to move at a more leisurely pace. Not long after arriving, however, Jeep gets pulled into a twisted web of secrets, money, and corruption when a wealthy childhood friend nicknamed Johnny Careless turns up dead. 

Stephen King. We probably don’t need to sell you on a fresh work by the horror maestro, but allow us a moment to rave about his stellar new suspense thriller. Never Flinch is an enthralling read composed of intertwining storylines — one about a revenge-motivated killer and another about a vigilante stalking a women’s rights activist. Detective Izzy Jaynes must get to the bottom of things after receiving an ominous letter threatening to kill both the innocent and the guilty. It’s a tough case, so Detective Jaynes turns to Holly Gibney, a character King fans will surely recognize from the author’s other works, for help.

We loved S. A. Cosby’s King of Ashes, one of the most propulsive thrillers of 2025. The instant New York Times bestseller is a Southern-set crime drama replete with gangsters, mystery, and family intrigue. Roman Carruthers, a financial whiz and the eldest son of the Carruthers family, returns home after his father has a terrible car crash. Upon arrival, he finds his sister, Neveah, at her wits’ end trying to run the family business on her own and his brother, Dante, deep in debt to some very dangerous people. So begins a roller-coaster crime tale that rivals The Godfather in its epic twists and pervasive tension. 

Lisa Jewell’s psychological thrillers rarely disappoint — and Don’t Let Him In is no exception. In the novel, widow Nina Swann receives a condolence card from Nick Radcliffe, an old friend of her late husband’s, who is eager to reconnect. Suave and appealing, Nick seems like the perfect man — but not to Nina’s daughter, Ash, who starts digging into Nick’s past and uncovers unsettling truths…. “Don’t Let Him In is creepy, twisty, and compulsively readable. It hooked me from the first page and never let me go” (Emily Henry, bestselling author of Funny Story). 

Nobody’s Fool is a deviously gripping new thriller by Edgar Award–winning author Harlen Coben and the second in his series about detective Sami Kierce. Years ago, a young Sami set out on a backpacking trip with his friends through Spain. But the journey of a lifetime turned into a nightmare when he awoke one day covered in blood, gripping a knife, with his dead girlfriend, Anna, nearby. Twenty-two years later, Sami is a private investigator and new father, making ends meet by teaching night school surveillance classes in New York City. One evening, a shockingly familiar face appears in the back of his classroom: Sami is certain it’s Anna. In a flash, the woman bolts, setting Sami on a desperate search for the truth about what actually happened all those years ago.  

The Black Wolf is the 20th book (!) in Louise Penny’s acclaimed Armand Gamache mystery series set in the snow-swept province of Quebec. In Penny’s new mystery, Chief Inspector Gamache and his team have just stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, capturing its mastermind, known as the Black Wolf. But as Gamache takes a closer look, he begins to suspect that the planned attack was a misdirect and that the dangerous figure known as the Black Wolf is still running free.  

Gillian McAllister’s bestselling novel Famous Last Words is a must for fans of twisting, turning works of suspense where no one is who they appear to be. The book centers on new mother Camilla, whose life is upended on her first day back from maternity leave when her mild-mannered husband Luke vanishes, leaving behind a cryptic note. Soon thereafter, news breaks of an emerging hostage crisis — and Luke is involved as the gunman. 

We’re still thinking about this glimmering, century-spanning mystery by CWA Gold Dagger Award–winning author Belinda Bauer. The Impossible Thing takes us back to Yorkshire circa 1926, where men rappel down seaside cliffs with ropes in search of stunning seabird eggs to be sold for hefty sums. Fast forward a century later: Patrick enters his friend Nick’s cottage in Wales only to find Nick and his mother tied up after a robbery. The only missing item? A carved case containing a gorgeous scarlet egg. 

Marble Hall Murders is the third book in Anthony Horowitz’s beloved Susan Ryeland series. The cunning literary mystery finds the book editor starting fresh in England, where her new gig has her working on an Atticus Pünd continuation novel, called Pünd’s Last Case. The writer of the book is Eliot Crace, the troubled grandson of famed children’s book author Miriam Crace. Eliot is convinced that his grandmother was poisoned years ago — and as Susan works her way through the manuscript, it becomes clear that Eliot has hidden clues about his grandmother’s demise in the narrative. Alarm bells begin to ring as Eliot’s behavior on and off the page turns increasingly erratic, putting everyone in danger. A delicious whodunit for Agatha Christie fans, Horowitz’s Marble Hall Murders is "diabolically clever”( The New York Times).