As we approach the end of the year, it’s time to celebrate the best crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of 2025. The works below feature quite a few old favorites at the top of their game, as well as several new voices possessed of a self-assurance at odds with their experience, and heralding great things to come. We kept it to 20 titles (plus our Notables) because we don’t want to inundate you with blurbs, but rest assured, there will be many more specialized year-end lists popping up on the site over the next few weeks. Make sure you’re signed up for the newsletter or risk the consequences (of missing, like, one list). And now, without further ado…the best crime books of the year!
We Are Watching, Alison Gaylin
(William Morrow)
Alison Gaylin has long been one of my favorite writers, and We Are Watching is the best so far. When an aging rock star goes viral on a streaming platform, he knows the soaring numbers stem not from the song’s popularity, but from a growing conspiracy theory with the song at its center. Gaylin’s heroine, owner of a family-oriented bookstore in a small town in upstate New York, at first dismisses her rockstar father’s warnings—until she finds herself targeted by a terrifying cult, one whose members believe she and her father made a world-ending pact with the devil. Now, they’re after her entire family, convinced they must be murdered on camera in order to prevent a Satanic apocalypse. I stayed up the entire night racing to the conclusion, then lying awake haunted by my own thoughts. –MO
King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby
(Flatiron)
The ballad of the Carruthers family in central Virginia – and the unforgettable Carruthers Crematorium – sets the stage for one of the best entries yet in S.A. Cosby’s growing body of impressive work. The family business is teetering on the brink and the wolves are at the door, with Cosby subtly ratcheting up the tension to almost unbearable levels, all while handling the delicate emotional relations of the siblings and their fallen father with delicacy. Cosby is a storyteller coming into the height of his powers, and King of Ashes is a family crime epic that will have readers catching their breath for years to come. –DM
The Search Committee, José Skinner
(Arte Publico)
The Search Committee is a hilarious and biting send-up of university culture and border politics from José Skinner, legendary Texas bookseller, professor, and author. In Skinner’s latest, a prospective instructor for a South Texas university gets kidnapped on the other side of the border during a louche lunch. After realizing his charge has vanished, her frantic escort decides to lie to the hiring committee and pretend she never showed up in the first place. What follows is a nasty little gem of a novel that may be the best satire of the 21st century. For more books as strange as this one, check out…pretty much the entire catalogue of Alienated Majesty, the Austin bookstore that Skinner owns with his wife, and that I can no longer go to with my wallet (because I spend waaaaaay too much money there). –MO
El Dorado Drive, Megan Abbott
(Putnam)
The Bishop sisters of Grand Rapids Michigan are at the center of Abbott’s newest novel, which, as is always the case with Abbott’s work, slowly works its way under your skin and floods your system with an inescapable sense of dread. In this case, it’s the investment scheme the sisters are caught up in that inevitably turns dark. The Wheel is supposedly a way for women to support women – a social club, a gathering cause, a community. But as the figures grow and new recruits are brought in, the cracks begin to spread and pretty soon we’re in a land of noir, the air thick with desperation and regret. Abbott is a master of atmospherics, and her style would carry her through just about any story, but this one packs a special punch. –DM
Ruth Run, Elizabeth Kaufman
(Penguin)
Elizabeth Kaufman’s page-turning debut features break-neck pacing, snappy dialogue, and a plot so choreographed I’m imagining a conspiracy board. In short, Ruth Run is a perfect thriller, and one that I hope heralds a revival of the genre—we’ve been inundated with thrillers of the psychological kind for some time, and while I have no interest in seeing those go by the wayside, it’s time for the classic thriller to get some respect (and some more readers). In Ruth, Run, the titular heroine is on the lamb after her long-running banking scam is uncovered by the FBI. As I cheered from the sidelines for the plucky thief, I found myself in awe of the plot’s intricacies and clever, multiplying reversals. –MO
Kill Your Darlings, Peter Swanson
(William Morrow)
Swanson’s latest mystery is among the cleverest you’ll come across anywhere in crime fiction: beginning with a seemingly reasonably happy marriage, except for the minor fact that the wife is possibly considering and sort of attempting to murder her husband. Swanson then tracks backward, telling the story in reverse, as the complex dynamics of that marriage reveal themselves and the family’s secrets are laid bare. Which brings us back to that attempted murder. Swanson manages the uncanny feat of laying out a genuinely compelling puzzle mystery while also finding the time and empathy to explore the nuances of marriage and aging relationships and the strange things they lead us toward. –DM
Best Offer Wins, Marisa Kashino
(Celadon)
Marisa Kashino’s razor-sharp thriller is a perfect sendoff of an impossible housing market and the lengths to which we go to fulfill our need for status and stability. Best Offer Wins follows a couple on their house search in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the most difficult places to secure a new home in the nation. They’ve been putting off having children until they’re out of their cramped apartment, and when the perfect house comes on the market, Kashino’s heroine finds herself ready to engage in escalating extrajudicial efforts to make the home her own, up to and including ditching her dithering husband, blackmailing the current owners, and even committing the cardinal sin: murder. –MO
The Slip, Lucas Schaefer
(Simon and Schuster)
Schaefer’s debut novel is one of the year’s big standouts, and with good reason: it’s a powerful portrait of modern America, packed inside a suspenseful tale of identify and transformation. A boxing gym in Austin, Texas, circa 1998, supplies the story with its setting and cast, a colorful array of local boxers and trainers that swallows up a sixteen year old and, a decade later, helps an uncle investigate what really happened back then. Schaefer gives us unforgettable characters working through big emotions, balancing perfectly the intimate and the national in this quietly epic mystery novel. –DM
Leverage, Amran Gowani
(Atria)
Gowani’s debut is a finance novel, a ticking-clock thriller, and a darkly funny satire of modern bro culture. A young hedge fund trader takes a massive loss, but rather than firing him, his boss gives him a deadline to recover the cash or take the fall on a government investigation. A twisted odyssey through some of the stranger and more corrupt pockets of the finance world ensues, with Gowani painting a vivid and unnervingly plausible portrait of just how much shady stuff is going out in the wilds of Wall Street. –DM
Crooks, Lou Berney
(William Morrow)
An intergenerational family drama plays out in Berney’s complex, layered new novel, which follows the various exploits and destinies of the Mercurios, as they move from Vegas to Oklahoma City and out across the world. Crime is the family business, the central practice and preoccupation of a unique family and its crooked legacy. Berney takes readers on an exhilarating ride through Vegas, the Midwest, Hollywood and even post-Soviet Russia, alongside different Mercurio siblings as they make their way in the world. The story is at once a gangster epic, a hustler’s manifesto, and so much more – in the end, a truly American story of crime and blood ties. –DM
With a Vengeance, Riley Sager
(Dutton)
Riley Sager may be better known for his horror, but this summer’s With a Vengeance proves Sager can tell a traditional mystery just as well as the Golden Age greats. With a Vengeance takes place in a closed environment (a train), and has a countdown time frame (the train cannot be stopped, and the passengers will be on it for exactly 13 hours); the passengers on the train are there to answer for their terrible destruction of a grand family, lured under false pretenses by the survivors, who may be robbed of legal vengeance if their hostages keep dropping like flies. Will any be left at the end of the journey? And who is so hell-bent on killing those who should answer in court for their crimes? –MO
Friends Helping Friends, Patrick Hoffman
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
In Hoffman’s exceptional new novel, a young man with dim prospects and a bad habit of getting caught up in trouble finds himself thrown into jail and pressed into service for the FBI, infiltrating a dangerous white supremacist group, led by his uncle. The screws tighten in thrilling fashion, as the situation becomes more and more threatening – and seemingly inescapable. Hoffman has long been a standout on the crime scene – his novels are at once gritty and sophisticated, cynically savvy and full of emotional depth. Readers will quite likely come out the other end of this story with a new perspective on the criminal justice system, and Hoffman’s snakebit characters will not soon be forgotten. –DM
Don’t Let Him In, Lisa Jewell
(Atria)
Lisa Jewell has steadily proven herself one of the best writers of psychological thrillers today, and her upcoming novel, featuring a nasty Lonely Hearts confidence man, looks to be her most astute study of human nature yet. In Don’t Let Him In, one man connects several disparate families, each ruined (or about to be) by his financial scheming. The true villain of Don’t Let Him In is the patriarchy and double standards that allow a smooth, charming, older man to give wealthy widows the bare minimum of good treatment and still seem nicer than 99% of other dudes. Despite the length, I swear you’ll finish this one in a single weekend. –MO
The House on Buzzards Bay, Dwyer Murphy
(Viking)
Dwyer Murphy’s third novel is a knottily brilliant psychosexual literary thriller that begins as a warm and melancholy ode to old friendships before morphing into something altogether darker and stranger. [Murphy is an editor at CrimeReads; Dan Sheehan is an editor at Lit Hub, its sister site.] The story of a group of old college friends, now approaching middle age, whose vacation at a beach house on Cape Cod turns sinister when their most taciturn member—a novelist with a wandering eye—disappears, and an alluring mystery woman shows up in his stead, The House on Buzzards Bay has the dreamily atmospheric menace of an Antonioni film. Murphy’s command of mood, his character portraits, and his sentence-level prowess make all his novels must-reads, but there’s a new eeriness to this one that I found particularly compelling. –Dan Sheehan, Lit Hub
The Dark Maestro, by Brendan Slocumb
(Doubleday)
Slocumb once again combines a deep knowledge of classical performance with a tightly executed crime story. In this latest, a cello player forced to go into witness protection must devise a way to use his talents to take down his family’s enemies, or face a future of never performing again. Erudite and exciting! –MO
Murder Takes a Vacation, Laura Lippman
(William Morrow)
Stalwart mystery author Lippman takes up the Agatha Christie mantle in her newest novel, Murder Takes a Vacation, in which Tess Monaghan’s longtime sidekick, Mrs. Blossom, gets her turn in the spotlight. The action sees Blossom head to France for a once-in-a-lifetime cruise; her interest is sparked by a man on board, but, naturally, the man soon turns up dead in Paris, and the ship begins looking more like a vipers’ nest, as Blossom unspools a mystery among the passengers. The new novel adds a welcome layer of depth to the character and constructs a worthy mystery for her to solve, all set against the splendors of a voyager’s France. –DM
Eva Menasse, Darkenbloom
Translated by Charlotte Collins
(Scribe)
In the sleepy town of Darkenbloom, located on the border between Austria and Hungary, a seemingly bucolic surface covers a dark history of unspeakable crimes. Those who suffered under the Nazis (at least, those who survived) live side-by-side with their former tormenters in a fragile detente. Their peace is shattered by the end of the cold war and the Pan-European Picnic, in which hundreds of East Germans on holiday in Hungary fled across the border, seeking asylum and unwittingly opening old wounds. Meanwhile, a mysterious visitor to the insular community is poking around in the past, a past much of the town would prefer not to recall. Stunning & shattering, Darkenbloom is also the rare historical novel to make full use of its setting. –MO
Mississippi Blue 42, Eli Cranor
(Soho)
Cranor was back again this year with another top-notch effort, this one diving into a world the author knows well: the wild, down home mean streets of college football. Cranor has quickly established himself as one of the premier crime novelists of his generation, and Mississippi Blue 42 marked a new evolution, pushing Cranor deeper into terrain somewhere between Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, with a story that’s full of characters who can talk a mile a minute and crooks that can’t stay out of their own way. This is a novel about more than just a game, but it’s also very much about that game and all the ways it’s wrapped up with the history and culture of a region. Cranor delivers the goods just about every year now, and his books are always a must read. –DM
Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie, James Lee Burke
Burke outdoes himself in the newest Bessie Holland novel, telling a story of sweeping historical scope and startlingly intimate human feeling. It’s the early Twentieth century, and Burke takes readers from the burgeoning oil fields of Texas to the streets of New York City, all alongside his indomitable heroine, and all told in Burke’s majestic prose. Burke has long since established himself as one of the modern era’s greatest crime writers; now his ambitions are rising still, as he tells a quintessentially American story with all the poetry and profundity readers have come to expect. –DM
The Favorites, Layne Fargo
(Random House)
Layne Fargo’s third novel has a simple premise, executed perfectly: Wuthering Heights, but make it Olympic figure skaters! And let me tell you, I like this story a lot more than the original inspiration—I’ll take an ice rink over the heather and moors any day of the week. In The Favorites, two skaters with incredible chemistry and terrible luck struggle to succeed in the cut-throat world of high-level ice dancing, where competitors embrace ever-more-vicious strategies to take down the golden couple and destroy their passionate romance. So effing good. –MO
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Notable Selections
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Alafair Burke, The Note (Knopf) · Polly Stewart, The Felons’ Ball(Harper) · Vijay Khurana, The Passenger Seat(Biblioasis) · Bradford Morrow, The Forger’s Requiem(Atlantic Monthly Press) · Thomas Perry, Pro Bono (Mysterious Press) · Susan Barker, Old Soul (Putnam) · Alafair Burke, The Note (Knopf) · Sarah Sligar, Vantage Point (MCD) · Scott Turow, Presumed Guilty (Grand Central) · Cynthia Weiner, A Gorgeous Excitement (Crown) · Jakob Kerr, Dead Money (Bantam) · Gillian McAllister, Famous Last Words (William Morrow) · Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief (Doubleday) · Baalu Girma, Oromay Translated by David Degusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu (Soho) · Isa Arsén, The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf (Putnam) · Sara Gran, Little Mysteries (Dreamland Books) · Ashley Winstead, This Book Will Bury Me (Sourcebooks) · Silvia Park, Luminous (Simon and Schuster) · Deanna Raybourn, Kills Well with Others (Berkley) · Rav Grewal-Kök, The Snares (Random House) · Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng · (Mira) Maha Khan Phillips, The Museum Detective (Soho) · Maha Khan Phillips, The Museum Detective (Soho) · Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker (Atlantic Monthly Press) · Abigail Dean, The Death of Us (Viking) · Daniel Kehlmann, The Director Translated by Ross Benjamin (Simon and Schuster / Summit Books) · Paul Vidich, The Poet’s Game (Pegasus) · Christina Li, The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster) · Andrea Bartz, The Last Ferry Out (Ballantine) · Ruth Ware, The Woman in Suite 11 (Gallery/Scout) · Ivy Pochoda, Ecstasy (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) · Joe Pan, Florida Palms (Simon & Schuster) · Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching (Del Rey) · Rob Hart, The Medusa Protocol (Putnam) · Riley Sager, With a Vengeance (Dutton) · Miranda Smith, Smile for the Cameras (Ballantine) · Mailan Doquang, Ceylon Sapphires (Mysterious Press) · Kaira Rouda, Jill Is Not Happy (Scarlet) · Kate Khavari, A Botanist’s Guide to Rituals and Revenge (Crooked Lane) · Dan Fesperman, Pariah (Knopf) · Gabriel Urza, The Silver State (Algonquin) · Harini Nagendra, Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus) · Megan Miranda, You Belong Here (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci) · Se-Ah Jang, A Twist of Fate Translated by S.L. Park (Bantam) · Clémence Michallon, The Last Resort (Knopf) · Tasha Coryell, Matchmaking for Psychopaths (Berkley) · David Gordon, Behind Sunset (Mysterious Press) · Alexis Soloski, Flashout (Flatiron) · Sulari Gentill, Five Found Dead (Poisoned Pen Press) · Samantha Downing, Too Old for This (Berkley) · Morgan Richter, The Understudy (Knopf) · Victor Suthammanont, Hollow Spaces (Counterpoint) · Hank Phillippi Ryan, All This Could Be Yours (Minotaur) · William Kent Krueger, Apostle’s Cove (Atria) · Walter Mosley, Gray Dawn (Mulholland) · Ron Currie, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne (Putnam)
