20 Must-Read Mysteries & Thrillers Heating Up This Winter
This winter’s lineup of mysteries and thrillers promises chilling twists, high-stakes suspense, and unforgettable characters, perfect companions for fireside reading or late-night binge sessions. From pulse-pounding crime novels to psychological thrillers that linger long after the final chapter, these are the books guaranteed to keep your heart racing and your mind spinning. Here are 20 of our most anticipated mysteries and thrillers coming this winter.
No one sees her, but she sees everything. Elinor Gilbert was once a young woman with a thriving career at the FBI.Now decades past solving crimes with the bureau, she is personally and professionally forgettable.
Which is exactly what her former FBI boss needs. He disguises Elinor as a middle-aged nanny, and casts her as an agent on the inside of his investigation into a New York art dealer suspected of ties to organized crime.
But as Elinor pushes toward the truth, her superpower—anonymity—morphs into a fatal flaw.
The more the invisible woman integrates into her “host” family, the more dangerously memorable she becomes.
But when a second body is discovered, there is not a doubt in Basil’s mind: a murderer walks among them. What’s more, the killer is staging each crime as a performance, leaving complex clues that bear an eerie resemblance to those found in the pages of Conan Doyle stories. This is a criminal who knows every trick in the book and is playing a deadly literary game. As the storm rages, Basil must become the genius detective he has only pretended to be.
On the isolated Eastern Shore of Virginia, Edith is a healer, a woman of knowledge—and a woman watched. Shadows move where they shouldn’t. Whispers creep through the dark. Terrified she has opened her home to the Devil, Edith makes a desperate choice.
Claire doesn’t believe in ghosts—until she returns home to care for her dying father and finds her childhood house… listening. As one sleepless night bleeds into the next, she becomes convinced something is stirring beneath the floorboards. Something that has waited a long time to rise.
Is the house haunted? What compels this lurking darkness? As the danger mounts, Edith and Claire will discover they’ll need each other to survive. But they are separated by four hundred years. And time is running out for them both.
Dubbed “the giant,” its arrival transforms the red-state farm town into a top-secret government research site and major metropolitan area, flooded with soldiers, scientists, bureaucrats, spies, criminals, conspiracy theorists—and a murderer.
As the sheriff of Little Springs, David Blunt thought he’d be keeping the peace among the same people he’d known all his life, not breaking up chanting crowds of cultists or battling an influx of drug dealers. As a series of brutal, bizarre murders strikes close to home, Blunt throws himself into the hunt for a killer who seems connected to the Giant.
With bodies piling up and tensions in Little Springs mounting, he realizes that to find the answers he needs, he must reconcile his old worldview with the town he now lives in—before it’s too late.
Inside Adam, discovers a collection of forgotten items: a wallet, an expensive watch and an old mobile phone. Jess thinks they should throw them away. But Adam resists. He is fascinated by these items and how they came to be inside the hidden room.
But like the house, Adam has his secrets too. And soon he will find himself setting in motion a series of events that will place his family in terrible danger . . .
Pendergast welcomes the banishment, because it gives him the opportunity to investigate a peculiar murder in Mississippi that has captured his fancy. Chambers grudgingly goes along. What starts off as a whimsical quest swiftly turns into a terrifying pursuit, as Chambers and Pendergast uncover a string of grisly, ritualistic killings that defy any known serial killer profile.
Thanks in large part to Pendergast’s brilliance and unorthodox methods, they solve the case and find the killer… and that is when the true horror begins.
Aliya reports her wife missing, but as a gay, Muslim daughter of immigrants, she can’t escape the scrutiny and suspicion of those around her. Scared and furious and feeling isolated as strangers and acquaintances alike doubt her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. She must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye even as she is torn between her fear that Sam is dead and her desire to find and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for them?
Now the Czech Republic wants the codex back, and Sweden has agreed to return it, but forces are at work to stop that deal from happening. The likely instigator? Russia. Who is also top of the list for possible kidnappers. It’s up to Cotton and Cassiopeia Vitt to locate the king’s sister, secure the codex, and thwart the Russians. Yet nothing is as it seems.
Trusted allies become hostile enemies. Long-standing enemies suddenly shift into partners. Making matters worse, an array of conflicting personalities re-emerge from Cotton’s past, transforming an already chaotic international situation into something far more personal and deadly.
From the cobbled streets of Stockholm with its placid waterways and picturesque islands, to the hostile skies over the Baltic Sea, and finally onto a fabled 16th century Swedish warship, Cotton and Cassiopeia come face-to-face with the unthinkable—changing both of their lives forever.
High above the Mediterranean, Sydney and Curtis are working on the isolated property and their relationship when a pair of Australian travelers turns up at their door in dire need of help. Lonely for companionship and desperate for free labor, Sydney and Curtis invite the attractive young couple to stay. But as the days pass, dark secrets come to light, the Lowes’ bond is tested, and not everyone will leave the villa alive.
This would all be fine . . . if it wasn’t a rush job, if he didn’t have to dodge a rival team, deal with his father’s constant criticism, worry about his sister’s surgery, and confront the ghosts of his parents’ past. But the question hanging over Duke’s head is what’s going to kill him first: the job itself or having to pull it off with his family.
The most respected citizen in Union Springs, Alabama (population 3,314), is Judge Mary Stone. She holds two responsibilities sacred: running her family farm and presiding over her courtroom. It’s there she draws the most controversial case in the history of the South.
Criminally, it’s open-and-shut.
Ethically, there is no middle ground. Essentially, it’s a choice between life and death.
No judge can satisfy everyone. It would be dangerous to try. But Judge Stone is willing to fight to bring justice to the people and place she loves.
Obsessively vowing to avenge his late wife’s murder, Mitch has been on a downward spiral, jeopardizing his closest relationships and drinking excessively to numb his pain. After going one step too far, Detective John Bowie, his former best friend and now his boss, has forced Mitch to get therapy to sort himself out.
Dr. Dylan Reede is immediately empathetic to the pain she senses beneath Mitch’s cavalier attitude and wisecracking. She’s determined to make the most of his mandated sessions. But from the moment Mitch breezes into her office, Dylan finds it a struggle to maintain the professional and personal boundaries that keep her own tragic past at a safe distance.
As Mitch begins to close in on Oz and Malone’s operation, they’re prepared to stop him by any means necessary. And when it’s revealed that Dylan might hold the key to bringing them to justice, Mitch and Dylan’s irresistible attraction to each other may not only compromise both of them professionally, but place them in Oz’s bullseye.
The chief of the town’s small police jurisdiction, who is also a family friend, asks for Graham’s assistance. Graham’s instincts immediately kick in and he soon discovers there’s more to the area—the people, its brutally quiet, sophisticated hierarchies—than he or his family ever knew.
From the critically acclaimed author of No Exit and The Last Word comes a story of two friends who embark on an ill-fated caving expedition—and the dark truth of what happens deep underground. After years of excuses, Tess has finally agreed to go caving with her best friend Allie. Their lives have diverged sharply since high school—Allie is a self-made travel influencer, while Tess is a shy (and claustrophobic) legal assistant struggling to pay for law school. Maybe she’s a little jealous of Allie’s globe-trotting life. Who wouldn’t be? As Tess and Allie descend into the depths, they realize they’re not alone. A stranger who claims to be a fellow caver harasses them. Confident, take-no-shit Allie insults the guy—and he retaliates. Soon, Tess is trapped inside a narrow crawl space hundreds of feet underground, fighting to stay alive. Twenty-four hours later, as a hospitalized Tess recounts her harrowing story of survival, the detective interviewing her shares new and shocking secrets about Allie’s true past. Together, they begin to suspect the brutal attack wasn’t so random after all.
Who was Allie, really? Why did this man target them? And did Tess really leave the danger behind when she escaped the cave?
With their increasing isolation, personal challenges become harder to ignore, even as they desperately try to break toxic generational patterns. But when Drew’s gaslighting becomes too much for Peggy to take, it sets off a catastrophic series of events.
Birdie Chang didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She’s a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend’s eyes–and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who’s now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution, a plan for revenge. But Birdie isn’t the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There’s also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book’s spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin’s loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.
Calvin’s death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunnit told from alternating points of view, Whidbey is searingly perceptive and astonishingly original. Exploring the long reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation, this is a tense and provocative debut that’s sure to incite crucial questions about the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?
Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts Golden-retriever-devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.
Until Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it—something strange is going on.
The question is, Is it with the house, or with her son?
And what is Elodie hiding?
Long after Archimboldi’s death, in a chaotic age of resurgent nationalism and violence, one of the only havens for his work is the ALI, the Archive for Literary Investment, where a biographer and his protégée search through Archimboldi’s correspondence for clues on the evil manuscript as they attempt to stop unscrupulous firms with their own plans for the manuscript.
Told from the perspective of a madman obsessed with The Truth of Carcosa and a ragtag group of friends, it becomes clear that this book is more than a book—and that it might be the answer to a bewildering set of questions:
Why is the Archive so desperate to preserve Archimboldi’s work?
Why do so many corporations seem hellbent on seizing any scrap of this mysterious manuscript—and at whatever cost?
What are the strange, dancing monsters that appear wherever Archimboldi’s work is discovered?
And who—or what—is the Yellow King?
Eden Fox, an artist on the brink of her big break, sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into, Spyglass, an enchanting old house in Hope Falls, nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn’t fit. A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that the stranger is his wife.
One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner called Birdy, reeling from a life-changing diagnosis, inherits Spyglass. This unexpected gift from a long-lost grandmother brings her to the pretty seaside village of Hope Falls. But then Birdy stumbles upon a shadowy London clinic that claims to be able to predict a person’s date of death, including her own. Secrets start to unravel, and as the line between truth and lies blurs, Birdy feels compelled to right some old wrongs.
My Husband’s Wife is a tangled web of deception, obsession, and mystery that will keep you guessing until the last page. Prepare yourself for the ultimate mind-bending marriage thriller and step inside Spyglass – if you dare – to experience a story where nothing is as it seems.
Her words used to set the page on fire. But a viral backlash over her latest film adaptation forced Petra Rose to take a hiatus, resulting in missed deadlines and an overdue mortgage. Branded a fraud and fame-hungry opportunist, she learned the hard way what happens when the internet turns on you. And she’s been uninspired to write ever since.
Now, with her next suspense novel outlined and savings nearly gone, she retreats to a secluded lakeside cabin, hoping to find inspiration. It’s Petra’s last-ditch attempt to save her career–and herself.
Then he shows up.
Detective Nathaniel Saint arrives with disturbing news, his presence igniting a creativity in her she thought long since burned out. Petra’s words return in a rush, and her fictional cop character begins to mirror the very real cop who’s becoming her muse.
Their “research” sessions blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Each glance, every touch pulls Petra deeper into a world she thought she’d never lose herself in again. She’s never felt more alive. But inspiration this powerful comes at a cost.
When Saint starts taking his role in her career a little too seriously, Petra’s forced to confront the chaos she created. But doing so could cost her more than the reputation she’s been trying to salvage. The reputation the world wrote for her–the reputation only she can reclaim.