From the return of your favorite voices in thrillers to debut authors and more, 2025 had plenty to offer for thriller junkies. Wondering what you missed in 2025 that you need to read before the new year? Check out our picks for the best thrillers of the year!
This year, the winner of the She Reads Best Thriller of 2025 Award is:
King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby
Roman Carruthers is coming home to support his two younger siblings after their father gets in a car accident. His brother, Dante, is in debt with dangerous criminals, and his sister, Neveah, is doing all she can to keep the family together while she assisted their father with the family-owned Carruthers Crematorium. Now home, Roman finds his father’s car accident was not an accident at all and it was Dante who brought danger knocking on the family’s front door. With nothing left to do, Roman begins to work for the dangerous criminals as a bargaining tool while Neveah starts to uncover the truth about their mother’s disappearance when they were teenagers.
Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon
And don’t miss out on the rest of our favorite thriller reads from 2025!
We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter
North Falls is the kind of town where everyone knows everyone…or do they? The big night of the fireworks, two local teenage girls vanish and the town is in an uproar. Officer Emmy Clifton takes this case to heart as she wasn’t able to be there for her best friend’s daughter when she needed her the most and now she will stop at nothing to find her. As Emmy’s investigation gets underway, she realizes the girls have secrets that someone would kill for, and that could bring the entire town down with them.
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Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson
Twenty-seven-year-old Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. On Halloween night, she is violently attacked and left with a head injury that could cause a fatal aneurysm at any time. Within a week, Jet could be dead and in that weeks time, she is desperate to find out who her attacker was and why they wanted her dead. Reconnecting with her childhood friend, Billy, the two work together to find who’s responsible for her attack.
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The Compound by Aisling Rawle
Twenty-something-year-old Lily and nineteen other contestants have just woken up on a remote desert compound to compete in a hit reality show. The winner has to stay in the Compound the longest while competing for luxury rewards and communal necessities for their new home. Cameras don’t miss anything. As the outside world falls apart, Lily has no desire to ever leave. When the producers raise the stakes and the competition lands in dangerous waters, the line between a game and survival blurs.
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Fog and Fury by Rachel Howzell Hall
After ten years working for the LAPD, Sonny Rush has moved to Haven, California, with her elderly mother and is going to work for her godfather’s PI company. Sonny’s first case is to locate a missing goldendoodle donning a Versace collar. After forty eight hours, Sonny has reunited with her ex, one of the wealthiest men in town. When the body of a teenaged boy is found along a hiking trail, she finds that Haven is hiding deadly secrets.
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Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
The Cassidy-Shaw family’s minivan has just collided with an oncoming car. Seventeen-year-old Charlie is the driver with his father, Noah, in the passenger seat. Tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones in the backseat while mother Lorelei is distracted by her work in the field of artificial intelligence. Everyone in the family is harboring a secret. During their weeklong recuperation on Chesapeake Bay, the consequences from their secrets and the crash are the collision they were never expecting.
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Count My Lies by Sophie Stava
Sloane Caraway lies a lot. Usually, they’re harmless lies that make her life seem a bit more interesting. When Sloane sees a young girl in tears at a park one afternoon, she lies to the handsome father that she’s a nurse and helps the girl with a bee sting. As her lie unravels, Sloane finds herself the new nanny for Jay and Violet Lockhart. As she spends more time with the family, she realizes she might not be the only one lying and beneath the shiny veneer of this beautiful family lies deadly secrets.
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Heartwood by Amity Gage
Forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis has just gone missing hiking in the woods of Maine, two hundred miles from her destination. Struggling to survive, Valerie writes fractured letters to her mother. Tasked with finding Valerie, Maine State Game Warden Beverly leads the search. Armchair detective Lena is a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher determined to find out what happened to Valerie. As the story unfolds and the search grows, Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.
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Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney
Grady Green is an author who encounters both the best and worst day of his life when he calls his wife, Abby, to tell her the good news he just received. On the phone, he hears Abby slam on her car brakes and get out of the car. When he finds her car, Abby has vanished. A year later, Grady travels to a small Scottish island to deal with his ever-present grief only to find a woman who looks exactly like Abby.
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This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead
After her father’s unexpected death, Jane Sharp finds herself obsessed with true crime and befriends other armchair detectives to help escape her grief. When news hits of the deaths of three female college students in Idaho, Jane and her friends find themselves determined to find out what really happened. But this case is strange, the details don’t add up, the police aren’t giving much information, and the media has taken over. As Jane and her friends find themselves enveloped in the case, they find they could be hunting a killer who is worse than any they’ve heard of before.
Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon
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