The 16 Most-Anticipated Mystery-Thriller Books of 2025

Release date: January 21

What do you get when you pair 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 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, and a few short stories. Her 2025 is poised to be just as good: She’s releasing the new title The Crash, and we’re already biting our cheeks at the description. It 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 finds her and offers 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. But poor 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

Not only is this one of the most anticipated thrillers of 2025 but one of the most anticipated pieces of literary fiction of the year, period. 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 she believes killed her.

Release date: February 11

February delivers Seraphina Nova Glass’s page-turning mystery about a woman whose life is changed forever when she’s attacked and left for dead at the same time that her husband Leo disappears. Just 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

Debuting in mid-February, 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 Gillian McAllister’s 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 already raving about the book, 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

Margot, Anna, and their new neighbor Liv appear to make fast friends, but there’s something sinister brewing beneath the surface of this trio’s bond in John Marrs’s forthcoming 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 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 who—or how to stop history from repeating itself.

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. This one drops in March, but you’ll want to pick it up ASAP since it's already set to hit the small screen as a TV adaptation at some point soon.

Release date: May 6

If this new collab between Crime Junkie podcast host Ashley Flowers and author Alex Keister is half as good as their No. 1 New York Times best-seller All Good People Here, fans are in for a real treat. A classic mystery, it sees heroine Nicole Monroe trying to move on from losing 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: June 24

British thrill writer and #Booktok fave Lisa Jewell will add to her growing collection of suspense novels in June with the release of the highly anticipated Don’t Let Him In. As for the identity of the nefarious “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 there's Al, who’s been neglecting his new wife Martha with his 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 Sellers list and nabbing a forthcoming Netflix adaptation led by Keira Knightley. Needless to say, fans can’t wait for the sequel, The Woman in Suite 11, coming this July. It 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 15

Primed for a mid-summer release, 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. Based on reviews of Day's advanced copies, which have racked up a collective 4.57-star rating on Goodreads, we won’t be putting this one down until we’ve read every last word.

Release date: September 30

Mary E. Roach’s Seven for a Secret is the most anticipated Goodreads thriller of 2025, so you know it’s worth adding to the stack. We’ll have to wait a while to read it, but that means we’ll have built up plenty of suspense once we get our hands on this young adult 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.