Andrea Park
New year, new mysteries to solve! Such is our M.O. as devout mystery-thriller book lovers (and pseudo-detectives). It’s a particularly fitting one, too, since, as it turns out, there’s been no shortage of new suspenseful titles to devour throughout 2025 so far.
From exciting novels by emerging writers to twisty new releases from #Booktok-obsessed, bestselling authors like Lisa Jewell (The Night She Disappeared, None of This Is True), Freida McFadden (the Housemaid series), and even a sequel by Ruth Ware (In a Dark, Dark Wood, One Perfect Couple), there is a lot worth holding space for this year on your TBR list.
Below, we're rounding up the best mystery-thriller books of 2025, including many that have already put our sleuthing skills to the test and several more still to come before the end of the year. We can guarantee you'll need to put on your whodunit caps and channel your inner Sherlock or Charlotte Holmes to guess the plot twists this year's books have in store.
Release date: January 21
What do you get when you combine a wealthy Delhi business owner on the verge of retirement, his three troubled kids, and a remote island? A high-stakes game of greed, of course! Raj has a succession plan bound to ruffle some of his children's feathers in this novel, which is like Succession meets Knives Out, or in other words, an absolute page-turner.
Release date: January 28
Freida McFadden dominated the thriller-mystery category in 2024, releasing three novels that went straight to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, plus a few short stories. Her 2025 is poised to be just as good: She’s on track to release another three novels and a novella to boot. Her first of the year was The Crash, which follows pregnant Tegan as she's stranded in a blizzard en route to her brother’s house, where she plans to put the broken pieces of her life back together. However, the couple who find her and offer to help aren’t as harmless as they seem, and she’s beginning to think she’d have been better off in the snow than in their nice, warm cabin.
Release date: January 28
Katie Garner's The Family Inside plays out every girlfriend’s worst fear. Namely, that her boyfriend will turn out to have a secret past—oh, and secret siblings, too. Iris Blodgett can’t afford to be too picky: She’s buried up to her eyeballs in debt in the wake of her late husband’s death, and her new partner has offered to give her and her daughter a roof over their heads in his mansion. Then again, some secrets are too dark to ignore…
Release date: January 28
Good Dirt unravels a mystery that has haunted Ebby Freeman for years after she discovered her brother, Baz, was shot to death near a shattered heirloom. The crime put Ebby's family in the spotlight, and, at 28, she finds herself fleeing public attention yet again. This time, it's at the end of a high-profile relationship and in Paris, where she’s beginning to put together the pieces of what happened that fateful night years ago.
Release date: January 28
True crime junkies are sure to love Carter Wilson's harrowing tale about a (what else?) true crime podcast host named Poe Webb. Poe invites sinister confessions from her guests with the promise of anonymity. She wasn’t prepared for one of them to confess to murdering her mother years ago, though—especially since she's been harboring a dark secret of her own about the fate of the man she believes killed her.
Release date: February 11
Seraphina Nova Glass’s page-turning mystery centers on a woman whose life is changed forever when she’s attacked and left for dead at the same time that her husband Leo disappears. When she’s begun to move on, strange things start happening: She’s receiving threatening notes reminiscent of the ones her attacker used to send, and she’s just uncovered a hidden bank account of Leo’s that’s mysteriously still active. When someone else goes missing from her life, it’s time to take action.
Release date: February 18
Elle Gonzalez Rose's The Girl You Know is a dark academia-inspired thriller about twin sisters named Luna and Solina. A short time after Solina announces that she wants to drop out of her fancy boarding school, she turns up dead. Now, it’s up to Luna to figure out what happened to her twin by standing in her place—but she’s not entirely prepared to discover the secrets her sister kept.
Release date: February 25
What would you do if you woke up to find your spouse missing…only to locate them on TV, at the center of a hostage crisis? Such is the reality for Famous Last Words protagonist Camilla. She has nothing but a cryptic note from her husband for a motive and a lifetime of questions about the man she married. If you weren't already hooked, bestselling author Emily Henry is among the book's devoted fans, calling McAllister "the best at putting her characters in impossible situations and making her readers not only contemplate but feel what it would be like to find themselves in those situations."
Release date: March 4
Consider this a formal apology to anyone I came into contact with while reading this book—I was simply unable to keep the thrilling, deliciously twisty plot to myself. Full of unreliable narrators with secrets, it follows 30-something Sloane Caraway as she becomes obsessed with a young family and begins worming her way into their lives, to chaotic effect. And the thrills never cease: A TV adaptation is already in the works at Hulu, starring Shailene Woodley and Lindsay Lohan.
Release date: March 4
A shocking murder, an urban legend, and a family scandal are the beginnings of the nightmare Chelsea Ichaso has woven for protagonist Eden Stafford. After attending a party at a notorious abandoned beach resort where bad things are rumored to happen to its visitors, Eden and the other party-goers are being followed, and they don’t know by whom—or how to stop history from repeating itself.
Release date: March 4
Margot, Anna, and their new neighbor Liv appear to make fast friends, but there’s something sinister brewing beneath the surface of the trio’s bond in John Marrs’s mystery. Each of these women has a secret, and one of them is dark enough to culminate in one of the women being bound, gagged, and left to die at the center of a raging bonfire. Her identity, however, remains to be read.
Release date: March 11
A light, PTA-jibing read, this is not: All the Other Mothers Hate Me's heroine, Florence Grimes, is forced to track down her son Dylan’s bully when he goes missing to clear Dylan’s name from the suspect list. But she’s not exactly cut out to be a PI, and she’s also not entirely sure her 10-year-old is innocent. You’ll want to pick this one up ASAP, since it's already set to hit the small screen as a TV adaptation at some point soon.
Release date: May 6
The latest collab between "Crime Junkie" podcast host Ashley Flowers and author Alex Kiester follows their No. 1 New York Times best-seller, All Good People Here. A classic mystery, it sees heroine Nicole Monroe as she tries to move on from the loss of her sister Kasey, who disappeared without a trace. However, she’s given a new lease on the search when a woman whose own sister disappeared just two weeks before Kasey reaches out. If they work together, maybe they’ll find the answers they’ve both been seeking…
Release date: May 20
In the latest novel by We Were Never Here author Andrea Bartz, grieving fiancée Abby finds herself on the paradise island of Isla Colel, where the love of her life died under mysterious circumstances. When she meets a group of tight-knit expats, she realizes that one of them knows what happened to her late partner—and she's determined to uncover the truth before she becomes the island's next victim.
Release date: June 24
British thriller writer and #Booktok fave Lisa Jewell added to her growing collection of suspense novels in June with this release. As for the identity of the nefarious titular “him,” it's anyone's guess, as two men come into different women's lives until they ultimately all collide. There’s Nick, who makes every effort to cozy up to his newly deceased pal’s widow, Nina, and her daughter Ash, and then there's Al, who’s been neglecting his new wife Martha with frequent work trips and mysterious spending. Neither man is exactly who he claims to be.
Release date: July 8
Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 was a runaway success, spending 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and nabbing a forthcoming Netflix adaptation led by Keira Knightley. This sequel picks up three years after the first book's heroine, Lo Blacklock, has welcomed her youngest child and is looking to reignite her journalism career. Luckily, she’s just snagged an invite to a luxury Swiss hotel owned by a billionaire recluse, and according to a woman who claims to be his mistress, he’s got some deadly secrets for Lo to uncover.
Release date: July 8
Clémence Michallon's taut debut thriller The Quiet Tenant was a runaway success, with a TV adaptation, executive produced by Charlize Theron, already in the works. In Michallon's stunning follow-up, Our Last Resort, two estranged siblings are forced to confront their shared past—and the secrets they've kept hidden—when a woman is found murdered at their exclusive resort.
Release date: July 15
The Lake Escape explores the darker side of a popular summer getaway where two women vanished 30 years apart. Now, whatever led to their disappearances seems to be happening again, as the guest of a group of friends who have been visiting the lake since they were kids has suddenly gone missing. And the plot twist? The mystery of the lake isn’t the only thing unraveling amongst them.
Release date: August 5
When an infamous chef’s husband died mysteriously, rumor had it that she’d been the one to kill him—and then serve him up for dinner. (Classic.) Decades later, that mystery still hovers around Maria Capello as she summons young writer Thea Woods to her home to help write her memoir, only for Thea to find herself irrevocably tangled in the very dark Capello family history.
Release date: September 23
Fans of The White Lotus and Knives Out will gobble up this whip-smart whodunit. The grandmother of a groom is found dead on the first morning of a glitzy wedding weekend, and her entire ultra-rich family demands that the journalist who’s there to cover the wedding keep the murder a secret and continue as normal. That won’t do for Christie, who proceeds to uncover layer after layer of toxic relationships and murder motives as she spends more time with the family. Good luck solving this especially twisty mystery before the big reveal—you’ll need it.
Release date: September 30
If you haven’t yet jumped on the Thursday Murder Club train, you really, really must. The incredibly charming, laugh-out-loud funny series follows a group of senior citizens as they solve the murder mysteries that have a habit of landing on their doorsteps. In this latest entry, for example, the quartet finds themselves unraveling a case involving a missing person, his suspicious business partner, and a seemingly uncrackable code. Plus, there’s never been a better time to get on board (except maybe five books ago), as August marks the debut of Netflix’s film adaptation of the first book in the series, with Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan among the star-studded cast.
Release date: September 30
Mary E. Roach’s Seven for a Secret was listed as the most anticipated Goodreads thriller of 2025, so you know it’s worth adding to the stack. It's a YA tale about a group home called Sister’s Place where girls mysteriously disappear. Nev is the one girl who got away, and now, she’s being forced to confront her past as the men in charge of the home are being killed off, one by one.
Release date: October 14
Through her eponymous book club and stellar track record in book-to-screen adaptations, Reese Witherspoon has proven to have impeccable taste in novels, especially of the women-led thriller variety. Now, she’s trying her hand at writing one of her own, teaming up with prolific suspense writer Harlan Coben to spin a tale about an ex-Army combat surgeon who, struggling to find her purpose in life, takes on a new job and soon finds herself swept up in a potentially deadly conspiracy.
Release date: November 18
Tanya Grant’s debut novel is reminiscent of a classic Agatha Christie-style locked-door whodunit—that is, if Christie wrote about social media influencers and their entourages. One such squad is the subject of this murder mystery, in which an all-expenses-paid content creation trip to a remote new resort in the Catskills turns deadly, with the friends being picked off one by one and the survivors left scrambling to figure out who’s responsible, even if it turns out to be one of them. Maybe not every vacation should make it out of the group chat.
