YA Mysteries & Thrillers Perfect for Spooky Season

Spooky season is the perfect time for mysteries and thrillers that keep you on edge. Haunted towns, deadly secrets, and chilling twists await in these page-turners. Friends trapped in games, ghosts that won’t stay gone, and curses promise nonstop suspense from start to finish.
Ilse has spent her whole life pretending to be afraid, hoping she’ll one day feel what everyone else does. But when her sister’s life is threatened, she steps into the forest no one else will enter. It is a place of old gods, strange beasts, and dangers buried beneath the surface.
After that night, Ren isn’t the same. He insists he’s in love, but Colin can’t shake the feeling that something is very wrong. Strange things begin to stir, pulling Colin into a world of demons, folklore, and dangerous secrets. If he wants to save his best friend, he’ll have to face forces he never believed were real.
Now she realizes she might be the star of her very own horror movie. Trapped on the island, she teams up with her best friend and the ghosts of classmates who won’t stay dead to uncover the truth. The closer she gets, the closer she comes to a deadly end.
Laurie tried to kill him once. No one talks about it. Evander hasn’t forgotten.
Now the house belongs to him, and Laurie’s back like nothing ever happened. The garden is growing fast and strange. Something at Hazelthorn isn’t right, and Evander’s starting to wonder if it ever was.
Meka has spent her life surrounded by death. Working in her family’s funeral home feels like second nature, and earning her mortician’s assistant license seems like the next step on a path she already knows well. She’s good at her job and doesn’t mind the work.
But lately, something isn’t right.
What starts as a strange incident quickly spirals into something she can’t explain. The line between the living and the dead is shifting, and Meka might be the only one willing to see what’s really going on.
Once the competition begins, nothing is as promised. The location is remote, the rules are unclear, and the challenges turn deadly fast. As the game spirals out of control, the contestants realize the dangers are far greater than they imagined, and not everyone will make it out alive.
Mercy Farr has lived under a curse her entire life. For generations her family and two others have been haunted by the Sorrowing, a dark force that slowly eats away at the town of Arbor Falls and punishes anyone connected to the cover up of the Gracey family murders. Mercy has already lost her mother to its merciless grip and she knows the curse will not rest until it has claimed them all.
When the Bowen family moves in, unaware that they are part of the cursed lineage, Mercy warns their son, Matteo. He refuses to accept his fate quietly, and together with friends, they set out to uncover the truth behind the Gracey murders and find a way to break the curse before it destroys more lives.
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