The Best Thriller Books to Read Right Now - The New York Times

The Best Thrillers of 2025

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Robyn Gigl’s Favorite Legal Thrillers

The author of the Erin McCabe series recommends her favorite courtroom dramas and legal whodunits.

Presumed Innocent
by Scott Turow
To Kill A Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
A Time to Kill
by John Grisham
The Stolen Hours
by Allen Eskens
Miracle Creek
by Angie Kim
Take It Back
by Kia Abdullah
All Her Little Secrets
by Wanda M. Morris
Read more about Robyn Gigl’s favorite legal thrillers.

New and Noteworthy

Our latest thriller reviews.

Wolvers
by Taylor Brown
This page-turner explores the battle between man and nature through three characters: an assassin stalking a federally protected wolf, a rancher and the she-wolf herself.
This Story Might Save Your Life
by Tiffany Crum
Crum’s cheery romance-mystery mashup follows two BFF podcast hosts who are about to hit a big break when one of them goes missing.
Haven
by Ani Katz
Reading this deeply unsettling thriller is like ingesting psychedelics, blundering into a dystopian-themed house of mirrors and realizing that someone has locked the door.
My Grandfather, the Master Detective
by Masateru Konishi
Konishi’s English-language debut is a cozy mystery dashed with magical realism and brimming with familial love.
Still Life
by Malin Persson Gioloto
Each story in Giolito’s linked collection underscores the ways crime can arrive at anyone’s doorstep.
The Tree of Light and Flowers
by Thomas Perry
Jane Whitefield, who specializes in helping desperate people disappear by creating new identities for them, makes a final, memorable appearance.
Her Last Breath
by Taylor Adams
An aging detective tries to unravel the story of a young woman who went caving with a friend and emerged alone, with strange injuries.
One of Us
by Elizabeth Day
Day’s knack for peeling back the vicissitudes of the British upper classes illuminates this novel about an aristocrat, his striving friend and their secrets.
Warning Signs
by Tracy Sierra
A 12-year-old boy grieving the recent death of his mother is trapped on a ski trip with his cruel father’s rich friends, which soon turns deadly.
What Boys Learn
by Andromeda Romano-Lax
When the bodies of two teenage girls turn up in a tony Chicago suburb, a friendless local boy is an obvious suspect. But is he a criminal?
The Final Problem
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte; translated by Frances Riddle
Lovers of old films, locked room mysteries and Sherlock Holmes will revel in the cunning setup and elegant execution of Pérez-Reverte’s novel.
The Briars
by Sarah Crouch
In a sleepy lake town, the newly appointed game warden finds that her job includes not just tracking down cougars but also solving a human murder.
The Reckoning
by Kelli Stanley
A woman on the run from the F.B.I. lands in a seemingly sleepy Northern California town, which turns out to be laden with explosive secrets.
A Gift Before Dying
by Malcolm Kempt
In an Arctic Canadian town, an investigator and the younger brother of a murdered teenage girl team up to catch her killer.
Wildwood
by Amy Pease
Pease’s mother-son law enforcement team returns, this time tackling the disappearance of a young woman from Wisconsin lake country.
Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging
by Mary Fortune
This collection cements the Australian author’s place as one of the detective story’s earliest, and finest, writers.
The Writing in the Water
by John Ajvide Lindqvist
This stylish Scandi-noir mystery follows a cop turned mystery novelist who, while researching her new book, finds herself investigating an actual crime.
The First Time I Saw Him
by Laura Dave
In the sequel to Dave’s smash hit “The Last Thing He Told Me,” Hannah’s shady tech exec husband reappears, and she and her stepdaughter hit the road.
Before the Fact
by Francis Iles
A young woman gradually realizes that her husband has murder on his mind — and that she is his intended victim.
To Catch a Thief
by David Dodge
To read the source material for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more effervescent films is an absolute blast.
The Secret of the Saucer
by Kris Bertin, illustrated by Alexander Forbes
For the third installment in their Hobtown Mystery Stories series, Bertin and Forbes subject the unlucky town to an alien attack.
Cape Fever
by Nadia Davids
A young Muslim maid and her white, British employer tangle in an unnamed colonial town in the 1920s in this Gothic thriller.
Lit
by Tim Sandlin
Sandlin’s novel is bursting with quirky characters, including a divorced writer and a pastor with a penchant for book burning who suddenly turns up dead.
Murder at the Christmas Emporium
by Andreina Cordani
In this locked-room mystery, things go very, very wrong at a ritzy London store during a holiday shopping extravaganza.
Gone Before Good-bye
by Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon
In Coben’s 39th novel — his first with Witherspoon — a surgeon who’s lost her license gets an offer to operate on a sketchy oligarch in the Russian countryside.
Listen
by Sacha Bronwasser; translated by David Colmer
A Dutch au pair fleeing a dark past gets entangled with a Parisian family with their own web of secrets.
Other People’s Fun
by Harriet Lane
Ruth — recently divorced, underemployed and facing down a bleak midlife moment — reunites with her #blessed former classmate in this prickly thriller.
Cry Havoc
by Jack Carr
The Navy SEAL Tom Reece continues to kick ass, take names and unravel bloody conspiracies in Carr’s latest military thriller.
Midnight in Memphis
by Thomas Dann
Dann’s evocative debut novel catapults readers back to 1950s Memphis, where a detective and his newbie trainee investigate a series of murders.
Boom Town
by Nic Stone
In Stone’s pacey, racy adult debut, a dancer at a strip club in Atlanta must search for her peers who have disappeared.
Murder in Constantinople
by A.E. Goldin
This historical mystery stars a Jewish tailor’s son in Victorian London who’s itching to see the world, and finds himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy.
Fox and Furious
by Rita Mae Brown
The 16th installment of Brown’s longrunning series finds “Sister” Jane Arnold trying to mediate a violent conflict between her sons, which soon escalates to murder.
The Dentist
by Tim Sullivan
A crossover from the U.K., where the series is already a hit, this police procedural stars a neurodivergent Bristol detective and his partner.
Remain
by Nicholas Sparks with M. Night Shyamalan
Rattled by his sister’s deathbed confession, Tate is living on sunny Cape Cod when he meets a mysterious and alluring young woman who upends his life.
The Glass Eel
by J.J. Viertel
The colorful underworld of the illegal eel trade is at the heart of this unusual mystery, set on a remote Maine island.
Guilty by Definition
by Susie Dent
A group of dictionary editors get embroiled in a series of literary puzzles after a letter arrives with clues about the unsolved disappearance of one staffer’s sister.
Clown Town
by Mick Herron
In this darkly comic thriller — the ninth in Herron’s Slough House series — an MI5 officer gets caught up in a blackmail scandal and assassination plot.

Police Procedurals: A Starter Pack

Sadie When She Died
by Ed McBain
The Choirboys
by Joseph Wambaugh
Shroud for a Nightingale
by P.D. James
Bluebird, Bluebird
by Attica Locke
I Was Dora Suarez
by Derek Raymond
Faithful Place
by Tana French
Have Mercy on Us All
by Fred Vargas
The Laughing Policeman
by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
Tokyo Express
by Seichō Matsumoto
Gorky Park
by Martin Cruz Smith
Death of a Red Heroine
by Qiu Xiaolong
The Last Coyote
by Michael Connelly
Pietr the Latvian
by Georges Simenon
Maigret and Monsieur Charles
by Georges Simenon
Get to know these essential police procedural novels with our guide.

Dark and Twisted Mysteries Set on Islands

The Island
by Adrian McKinty
A family on an Australian vacation bribes their way onto an island that is off-limits to visitors — and inhabited by locals straight out of the movie “Deliverance.”
Reckless Girls
by Rachel Hawkins
A young woman visiting a remote atoll in the South Pacific learns that her supposedly chill vacation friends are actually a bunch of unhinged, vengeful impostors.
The Decagon House Murders
by Yukito Ayatsuji
College students foolishly decide to spend a week on Tsunojima Island, attracted to the place — and its 10-sided house — because of a recent spate of murders.
Something in the Water
by Catherine Steadman
A couple scuba-diving in Bora Bora on their honeymoon find a black duffle bag loaded with diamonds, cash and a gun, and decide to keep it. Not a great idea, it turns out.
The Guest List
by Lucy Foley
A major storm is brewing when a glossy young couple and their wedding party arrive on a possibly haunted Irish island.
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
This twist on H.G. Wells’s “The Island of Doctor Moreau” takes readers to 19th-century Mexico, where a young woman is kept alive by her father’s experiments.
Hokuloa Road
by Elizabeth Hand
After Kendall takes a job as the caretaker of a remote Hawaiian estate, a local warns him: “Hokuloa can be really intense. Be careful after dark.”
Daisy Darker
by Alice Feeney
Daisy and her sisters travel to a private island off the Cornish coast to celebrate their mother, a famous author. It isn’t long before corpses begin to pile up.
Beautiful Animals
by Lawrence Osborne
A group of moneyed, myopic vacationers flock to the Greek isle Hydra. One of them, a beautiful young woman, is also a sociopath.

Hank Phillippi Ryan’s Favorite Locked-Room Mysteries

The author of “All This Could Be Yours” recommends seemingly impossible, deeply satisfying whodunits.

They All Fall Down
by Rachel Howzell Hall
The Last Murder at the End of the World
by Stuart Turton
Five Found Dead
by Sulari Gentill
With a Vengeance
by Riley Sager
You Are Fatally Invited
by Ande Pliego
City Under One Roof
by Iris Yamashita
An Unwanted Guest
by Shari Lapena
Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
The Hollow Man
by John Dickson Carr
Read more about Hank Phillippi Ryan’s favorite locked-room mysteries.

4 Thriller Novels We Recommend

Our columnist Sarah Lyall recommends some of her all-time favorites.

In the Woods
by Tana French
The Anomaly
by Hervé Le Tellier
Fatherland
by Robert Harris
Presumed Guilty
by Scott Turow

New in Paperback

Tinier, but just as mighty.

You Are Fatally Invited
by Ande Pliego
Fair Play
by Louise Hegarty
Big Bad Wool
by Leonie Swann
Marble Hall Murders
by Anthony Horowitz
The Three Lives of Cate Kay
by Kate Fagan
Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave
by Elle Cosimano
Kills Well With Others
by Deanna Raybourn
Cross My Heart
by Megan Collins
Heartwood
by Amity Gaige
I Was a Teenage Slasher
by Stephen Graham Jones
Vantage Point
by Sara Sligar
The Human Scale
by Lawrence Wright
The Night Guest
by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Nobody’s Hero
by M.W. Craven
The Note
by Alafair Burke
The Couple Next Door
by Shari Lapena
Vengeance
by John Banville
Havoc
by Christopher Bollen
The God of the Woods
by Liz Moore
Deadly Animals
by Marie Tierney
Bright Objects
by Ruby Todd
The Bog Wife
by Kay Chronister
Ring Shout
by P. Djèlí Clark
On the Savage Side
by Tiffany McDaniel
Blood Test
by Charles Baxter
Model Home
by Rivers Solomon
The Sequel
by Jean Hanff Korelitz
The Blue Hour
by Paula Hawkins
The Hitchcock Hotel
by Stephanie Wrobel
Tell Me Everything
by Elizabeth Strout
The Nature of Disappearing
by Kimi Cunningham Grant

M.L. Rio’s Favorite Gothic Thrillers

The author of “If We Were Villains” recommends novels that will make you shiver with delight one moment and recoil in horror the next.

Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
The Keep
by Jennifer Egan
A Heart So White
by Javier Marías; translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Earthlings
by Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
Fledgling
by Octavia E. Butler
Sundial
by Catriona Ward
The Cement Garden
by Ian McEwan
The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Child of God
by Cormac McCarthy
Our Share of Night
by Mariana Enríquez; translated by Megan McDowell
Read more about M.L. Rio’s favorite Gothic thrillers.

The Essential Patricia Highsmith

Elizabeth Arnott’s Favorite Housewife Revenge Thrillers

The author of “The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives” recommends tales of domestic vengeance and feminine power.

Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
The Change
by Kirsten Miller
The First Wives Club
by Olivia Goldsmith
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
The Bandit Queens
by Parini Shroff
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
by Fay Weldon
The Husbands
by Chandler Baker
Iron Widow
by Xiran Jay Zhao
Read more about Elizabeth Arnott’s favorite domestic revenge thrillers.

Still Haven’t Found What You’re Looking For?

Tell us what kind of thrillers you want to read. We may feature them on this page or in an upcoming story.