Mystery and Thriller Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2025

By Brandon Miller

Get ready, detective. Whether you’re a fan of hard-hitting crime fiction, eerie supernatural thrillers, or cozy whodunits, the propulsive reads below are sure to get your heart racing in the new year. Here are the mystery and thriller books we're looking forward to reading in 2025.

Johnny Careless

By Kevin Wade

Kevin Wade knows how to craft a killer tale — he’s a veteran screenwriter and the showrunner of the hit police procedural series Blue Bloods. With his new novel, Wade delivers a first-rate crime narrative that’s “fresh and wildly entertaining, [with] characters so real you expect them to walk through the door” (Patricia Cornwell, New York Times bestselling author). Johnny Careless focuses on the mysterious murder of Johnny Chambliss, a privileged man nicknamed “Johnny Careless” for his reckless approach to life. When Johnny’s corpse is found in the Bayville waters off Long Island’s North Shore, Jeep Mullane — Chambliss’s childhood friend and the local police chief — plunges into the case. Johnny’s rich, cagey relatives and perplexing ex-wife make the investigation harder than it should be. And since Jeep grew up modestly in an area of staggering wealth, his search for the truth is just as much a story about the haves and have-nots as it is a thrilling murder mystery. 

 

Publication date: January 28, 2025

The Man Made of Smoke

By Alex North

Alex North’s previous supernatural thrillers, The Whisper Man and The Shadows, haunted our days and nights in the best way possible. His latest creepy tale looks just as chilling. The Man Made of Smoke centers on Dan Garvie, who escaped the grasp of a serial killer as a child and has been obsessed with seeking justice ever since. Now a criminal profiler, Dan returns to the small town of his youth after his father dies in strange circumstances — and you know it’s never a good thing when someone is drawn back to their old stomping grounds by a baffling death. 

 

Publication date: May 13, 2025

Beautiful Ugly

By Alice Feeney

We’re big fans of Alice Feeney’s work, from Daisy Darker to His & Hers. So we obviously cannot wait to get our hands on Beautiful Ugly this January. The thriller centers on Grady Green, a writer devastated by the shock disappearance of his wife, Abby. Abby’s car and phone are found on the edge of a cliff, with Abby nowhere to be found. After a year of grief-induced insomnia, Grady heads to a small Scottish island in hopes of regaining control of his life — only to cross paths with a woman who looks exactly like his missing spouse. 

 

Publication date: January 14, 2025

Murder Takes a Vacation

By Laura Lippman

New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman returns this year with the irresistibly titled Murder Takes a Vacation. The spin-off novel focuses on Muriel Blossom, who used to assist private investigator Tess Monaghan — the central character in many of Lippman’s acclaimed thrillers, including Baltimore Blues. Muriel is no longer an investigator, but she gets sucked into a mystery after a charming man she meets turns up dead a day later. She meets the man, Allan, en route to a river cruise through France. But now Muriel is wary of everyone aboard the ship, especially a man named Danny, who claims that Allan was smuggling stolen art. It’s not quite the vacation Muriel had planned, but it certainly sounds like a great new mystery to read on our next vacation. 

 

Publication date: June 17, 2025

With a Vengeance

By Riley Sager

Bestselling author Riley Sager is a leading voice in the mystery and thriller world, and we’re dead excited for his new psychological thriller to come out later this year. In With a Vengeance, Anna Matheson lures six people onto a luxury train headed from Chicago to Philadelphia. Twelve years ago, in 1942, the six passengers destroyed Anna’s family; now Anna hopes to hand her enemies over to the authorities, but a murder on the train derails her plans. Turns out she isn’t the only person onboard with a one-way ticket for revenge. 

 

Publication date: June 10, 2025

 

The Maid’s Secret

By Nita Prose

The Maid’s Secret is the third novel in Nita Prose’s acclaimed Molly the Maid series and is sure to delight cozy mystery fans. Head maid Molly Gray has recently been promoted to special events manager at the Regency Grand Hotel. She’s also two months out from marrying Juan Manuel, so things are going great … until a film crew arrives to shoot a reality show. The show, Hidden Treasures, centers on art appraisers Brown and Beagle, and it inspires Molly to bring in a shoebox of her grandmother’s old things for appraisal. One item turns out to be incredibly valuable, making Molly rich and turning her into a big media story. But then the piece vanishes, setting us up for a sure-to-be-interesting mystery involving Molly’s gran’s diary. 

 

Publication date: April 8, 2025

 

Marble Hall Murders

By Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz’s knotty meta mysteries never disappoint, and we’re very excited for Marble Hall Murders, the third in Horowitz’s bestselling Susan Ryeland series. In it, book editor Susan leaves Greece for a new life in England. She’s freelancing for a publisher and working on a novel by young author Eliot Crace. Eliot reveals himself to be the grandson of legendary children’s author Marian Crace, whom he claims was poisoned 15 years ago. Eliot’s manuscript is good, so it’s not the writing that concerns Susan but the clues hidden within the pages that hint at the mystery of Marian’s death. Then Eliot becomes erratic, and things take a shocking turn that puts Susan’s livelihood at risk. 

 

Publication date: May 13, 2025

Nobody’s Fool

By Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben needs no introduction. The bestselling author has written plenty of blockbuster suspense thrillers, including The Stranger and The Innocent. His latest, Nobody’s Fool, is the follow-up to Fool Me Once. Sami Kierce returns to investigate a dark incident from his past. Decades ago, Sami was on a backpacking trip through Spain when he woke up with a knife in his hand and his girlfriend Anna’s dead body beside him. Twenty-two years later, Sami is shocked to see Anna among his students in a night school course. Anna bolts from the classroom as soon as the pair make eye contact, setting us up for one heck of a compelling mystery. 

 

Publication date: March 25, 2025

Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)

By Jesse Q. Sutanto

The follow-up to Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) looks just as enjoyable as her first funny mystery. Life is pretty good for Vera: Business has been booming at the teahouse ever since it doubled as a crime scene, and her son has found love, albeit with Selena Gray, the cop with whom Vera butted heads in the first book. Despite the good news, however, Vera’s feeling a bit restless — bored, even. Then she meets a distressed woman looking for her missing friend, influencer Xander Lin. Vera begins poking around for clues, only to discover a perplexing reality: Nobody appears to actually know the social media superstar. 

 

Publication date: April 1, 2025

Blood Ties

By Jo Nesbø

Jo Nesbø, creator of the Inspector Harry Hole mysteries, is a titan of Nordic noir. His latest, Blood Ties, is a sequel to 2020’s The Kingdom and will hit U.S. shelves this winter. The book takes us back to the small town of Os, where ruthless brothers Carl and Roy Opgard are doing quite well until a new highway threatens to disrupt access to their town. Meanwhile, the town’s sheriff has reopened a set of unsolved murder cases from the past, including the killing of his own father. When fresh bodies turn up, the situation intensifies — and we cannot wait to see where Nesbø takes us next. 

 

Publication date: February 11, 2025

Don’t Open Your Eyes

By Liv Constantine

Liv Constantine is the pen name of sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine, the pair behind captivating domestic thrillers such as The Last Mrs. Parrish and The Senator’s Wife. In Don’t Open Your Eyes, a woman named Annabelle is tortured by dreams of an unhappy marriage and her daughters’ lives being at risk. When details from the dreams materialize in real life, she realizes that they may actually be premonitions — and everything points to a choice Annabelle must make before her life falls apart. 

 

Publication date: June 17, 2025

 

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