The Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2025

2025 has barely begun, but it’s already shaping up to be a terrible year, full of incredible books. As per usual, we’ve assembled a great big list of all the crime, mystery, horror, and thriller titles to keep an eye out for in the coming months; trends I have already spotted and will of course be highlighting in future list articles, including: cannibalism! heists! capers! class warfare! swapped identities! serial killers! social climbers! psychotic fame hounds! Georgian England!

Thanks to my colleagues over at Lit Hub for allowing me to use a few of their blurbs from the Lit Hub Most Anticipated to fill out our humble list. With the dissolution of social media ethics and the degeneration of the internet, paired with the rise of AI, we need gritty novels exploring the realistic implications of our modern discontents more than ever. *gets off of high horse* God speed, and good reading.

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JANUARY

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Alison Gaylin, We Are Watching
(William Morrow)

I’m hoping this book takes Alison Gaylin from fan favorite to household name—I know I say this with each of her books, but We Are Watching is her best yet. It also feels both deeply personal & extraordinarily timely, with a plot straight out of the news cycle (and my nightmares). The set-up? Gaylin’s heroine, owner of a family-oriented book­store in a small town in upstate New York, finds herself targeted by a terrifying group of conspiracy theorists convinced that she and her rockstar father made a pact with the devil to destroy the world. 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

Paraic O’Donnell, The Naming of the Birds
(Tin House)

A serial killer with immaculate tendencies haunts the local populace, beginning with a retired civil servant, in O’Donnell’s new mystery, which is tinged with notes of Victorian gothic. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief

AJ West, The Betrayal of Thomas True
(Orenda)

The Betrayal of Thomas True has an incredible setting: the Molly Houses of Georgian England, spaces for male sex workers to safely ply their trade and host to the queer luminaries of London and their spectacular salons and performances. A bouncer for the most famed Molly House is tasked with solving a series of murders threatening their community, as he falls deeply in love with a newcomer to the city. Historical crime fiction perfection! –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Grady Hendrix, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
(Berkley)

You tell me that this book doesn’t sound like a hell of a good time, exactly the sort of thing to curl up with during the January doldrums! It takes place at a home for pregnant, single young girls—an institution where they can secretly have their babies, outside of public scrutiny. But then one of them gets an occult book… and things ramp up from there. –Olivia Rutigliano, Lit Hub and CrimeReads Editor

Bradford Morrow, The Forger’s Requiem
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

The newest installment in this sophisticated mystery series continues the intrigues of rival forgers, this time with an emphasis on a daughter’s revenge and an intricate puzzle built from forged Mary Shelley letters. –DM

Layne Fargo, The Favorites
(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

Trisha Tobias, Honeysuckle & Bone
(Zando)

This is the first release from Zando’’s new Sweet July imprint, run by the beloved Ayesha Curry, and Honeysuckle & Bone is a perfect pick for their launch—dark, romantic, and compelling. The set up is simple, but thrilling: a young woman has escaped turmoil at home by taking a job as a nanny for a wealthy and powerful Jamaican family. All she has to do is keep them from finding out she’s there under false pretenses, and under an assumed identity. And avoid romantic entanglements, which will be difficult given the many thirst traps introduced in the first few pages *fans self*. –MO

Eric Dezenhall, Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals They Made
(Harper Books)

Organized crime surrounding the Presidency is nothing new, and Dezenhall lays out a rollicking, if disturbing history of various mobs working in and around the nation’s highest office. –DM

Thomas Perry, Pro Bono
(Mysterious Press)

An attorney with a skill for recovering assets takes a new case to help a recent widow and soon finds himself shot at, followed, and generally tangled up in a dangerous mess. Perry, a master storyteller, unspools the mystery at breakneck speed and the financial crime at the heart of Pro Bono makes for genuinely compelling suspense. –DM

Trisha Sakhlecha, The Inheritance 
(Pamela Dorman)

At last, a psychological thriller that mentions the Highland Clearances! Trisha Sakhlecha’s propulsive debut reads a bit like Succession, if it was a locked room mystery set on a terrifyingly remote island. When a wealthy Indian family reunites to celebrate their patriarch’s retirement, the younger generation plans to spend their vacation squabbling over finances, but a shocking tragedy soon threatens to dismantle their empire entirely. –MO

Alex Hay, The Queen of Fives
(Graydon House)

Perhaps 2025 is the year of the heist, especially given the IRL increase in property crimes against the uberwealthy (excuse me while I go in search of the world’s tiniest violin, which would probably be locked up in a billionaire’s art collection or a Swiss warehouse). Alex Hay already won me over with the impeccably crafted Housekeepers, and The Queen of Fives should cement Hay’s reputation as the underworld king of Victorian capers, featuring a long con for the ages, a queer-coded marriage plot, and plenty of outfit changes. –MO

Dennis Mahoney, Our Winter Monster
(Hell’s Hundred)

A couple on a road trip to fix their marriage instead find themselves stranded in a snowstorm and facing a supernatural threat of epic proportions. This one has the same vibes as cult classic I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but with a snowstorm ratcheting the tension waaay up. –MO

Matthew Pearl, Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder
(Harper Books)

From the editor of Truly*Adventurous comes a staggering account of a family castaway on a deserted island and confronted by a mysterious man who first appears to be their salvation, before a more difficult truth emerges. Pearl works in the vein of David Grann and consistently produces first-rate nonfiction.  –DM

Makana Yamamoto, Hammagang Luck
(Harper Voyager)

Hawaiians in space, planning a heist—what’s not to love? In this queer anti-capitalist caper, former outlaw Edie is determined to abide by the law after 8 years in prison, but their loved ones are in need of more money than a regular job can provide—so Edie reluctantly agree to one last job, organized by Angel, their femme-fatale-will-they-or-won’t-they former partner in crime, and the source of much unresolved sexual tension with the novel’s handsome enby lead. Angel’s got a plan to rob the richest man in the galaxy, and she’s assembled a team that might just pull off the toughest heist in galactic history. –MO

Kate Winkler Dawson, The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
(Putnam)

This new nonfiction study from Kate Winkler Dawson reexamines the notorious early American murder of Sarah Maria Cornell, alongside a Victorian era account from true crime sensation Catharine Read Arnold Williams. –DM

Susan Barker, Old Soul
(Putnam)

This book IS THE MOOD, and the mood is dark. Old Soul feels like if Thomas Pynchon’s V was a Georgia O’Keefe painting. At the start of Barker’s latest, two strangers who miss their flight discover a strange supernatural mystery in common: each lost a loved one suddenly and inexplicably, and each of their objects of grief had encountered an unsettling woman just before their untimely demise: a woman who appears never to age and who insists on taking photographs of her chosen victims. What follows is an epic chase around the world to track down evidence of a malevolent killer in hopes of eventually finding the woman herself. –MO

Alafair Burke, The Note
(Knopf)

In Burke’s tense new thriller, three friends with a shared secret reunite for a few days in the Hamptons and soon find themselves caught up in a troubling police investigation. Burke is a mater of suspense and the twists in this one will genuinely shock readers. –DM

Sarah Sligar, Vantage Point
(MCD)

I highly enjoyed Sligar’s twisty debut, Take Me Apart, and have been extremely excited for her follow-up, a tale of the younger generation of an old-money New England family who must reckon with a supposed curse placed on their family tree. But the fascinating thing (and unsurprising from Sligar, who knits together themes of “the modern” and “legacy” skillfully) is that the curse, wrought this round on millennials, takes the form of digital hauntings! –OR

Robert Littell, Bronshtein in the Bronx
(Soho Press)

For those who enjoyed Yuri Hererra’s account of Mexican hero Benito Juarez’s time in New Orleans, here’s another tale of revolutionary exile: Trotsky in NYC! Robert Littel is the perfect person to take on this daunting task without sacrificing story, and I’m psyched to dive into Leon’s days in the city I once called home.  –MO

Scott Turow, Presumed Guilty
(Grand Central)

A new installment in the life and times of Rusty Sabich arrives just in time for recent converts coming over from the splashy adaptation of Presumed Innocent. Turow is still at the top of his game and writes a first-class legal thriller. –DM

Cynthia Weiner, A Gorgeous Excitement
(Crown Publishing Group)

This book will haunt me for a long time. Cynthia Weiner is intimately familiar with the 1980s NYC preppy scene: close enough to recall its details, and distant enough to critique it intelligently. In this riff on the story of the notorious Preppy Killer and his much-maligned victim, Cynthia Weiner condemns the callous attitudes and conspicuous consumption of an entire strata of society ready to believe the worst of an outsider while refusing to see the truth of one of their own. –MO

Clay McLeod Chapman, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
(Quirk)

Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming horror novel is the perfect post-Election read: namely, in that it features demonic forces taking possession of their viewers through the TV network Fax News (Just the Fax!) The ways in which the story evolves take the plot in directions that make all of us understand our complicity in the toxicity of today. –MO

Megan Collins, Cross My Heart 
(Atria)

Maybe it’s just the fact that I finally watched Baby Reindeer, but stories about female stalkers are having a moment. In one of the most unhinged set-ups yet, Cross My Heart features a woman who, after getting a successful heart transplant, falls for the bereaved widower of her organ donor. Honestly this novel proves that psychological thrillers are the only antidote to romcom creepiness (remember that Minnie Driver and David Duchovny heart transplant movie?). –MO

Andrew Welsh-Huggins, The Mailman
(Mysterious Press)

The delivery of a very special package and a kidnapping precipitate a cross-country road trip in Welsh-Huggins’ new thriller, which brings readers a memorable protagonist and a high-octane plot. –DM

Charmaine Wilkerson, Good Dirt
(Ballantine)

Charmaine Wilkerson’s follow-up to Black Cake, her breakout debut, looks to be just as thrilling and emotionally resonant. This multigenerational epic features the wealthy but cursed Freeman family, one of the only Black families in their wealthy enclave of New England and victims of an unsolved crime that, decades later, continues to fuel the public’s curiosity; when a new disaster befalls them, they must delve deep into the family’s past for the key to saving their futures from ruin and exploitation. Perfect reading for gothic season! –MO

Jakob Kerr, Dead Money
(Bantam)

A Silicon Valley fixer features in Kerr’s new financial thriller, a fast-paced dissection of modern tech culture and a genuinely thrilling page-turner. –DM

Fiona Davis, The Stolen Queen
(Dutton)

An ancient curse! A missing artifact! The Met Gala! This book is so much fun! Fiona Davis’s scintillating, twisty new novel toggles back between Egypt in 1936 and New York City in 1978, as we follow two timelines of the same mystery, and two bold heroines who meet at the Met to solve a decades-old… and maybe centuries-old mystery. –OR

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FEBRUARY

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Gillian McAllister, Famous Last Words
(William Morrow)

Gillian McAllister’s latest should be a strong contender for most suspenseful thriller of the year—truly nailbiting levels of tension. As Famous Last Words begins, McAllister’s heroine has just returned to her work as a literary agent after almost a year of maternity leave, but in the worst First Day Back ever, is immediately called away again by her husband’s bizarre actions. He’s taken several people hostage, and no one has any clue as to why, with a jarring note left on the counter his wife’s only clue to interpreting his actions (the titular famous last words). –MO

William Boyle, Saint of the Narrows Street
(Soho)

Boyle continues filling out the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn with powerful, emotionally complex crime stories. In Saint of the Narrows Street, two sisters arrange for a terrible secret to be hidden, reverberating across the generations. Boyle’s work is always traced with melancholy and never shies away from the tough moral predicaments his characters face. –DM

Deon Meyer, Leo
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

Meyer delivers another top-notch thriller out of South Africa, this one finding Detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido in exile from Cape Town, working a murder out of a university town, when another killing across the country reverberates with their investigation and opens the possibility of a broader conspiracy. –DM

Kat Dunn, Hungerstone
(Zando)

Before the very gay Dracula was ever conceived, there was the much gayer Carmilla—a queer-coded novella of female desire and insatiable hunger. Kat Dunn has taken that original inspiration and made it much stranger (and hotter), as we follow the journey of an unhappy aristocratic wife slowly coming to embrace her unholy appetites, under the guidance of an extremely sexy vampire/chaos queen. *fans self* –MO

Patrick Modiano, tr. Mark Polizzotti, Ballerina
(Yale University Press)

Yale University Press brings American readers another gift this year: a new translation of the Nobel-prize winning Modiano’s rich, evocative Ballerina, set in the world of dance (and oblique existential mysteries) in 1960s Paris. –DM

Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief
(Doubleday)

I’ve longed for a retelling of Fagin’s life, and Allison Epstein, in possession of a deep knowledge of history and a rare talent for characterization, is the perfect one to take on this story. –MO

Baalu Girma, Oromay 
Translated by David Degusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu
(Soho)

Baalu Girma worked as a journalist during the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea and wrote this novel just before he vanished, presumed murdered. In his magnum opus, translated into English for the first time, a cynical journalist helms a vast propaganda effort aimed at convincing Eritrea’s rebel forces to capitulate, while struggling to contain his growing disillusionment. Despite its heavy subject matter, Oromay is full of dark humor and heartfelt sentiment, and to read it is to gain a sense of the dynamism and liveliness of its author, making his fate all the more tragic to contemplate. –MO

Cornell Woolrich, The Black Curtain
(American Mystery Classics)

An introduction from George Pelecanos is one of the many delights of this re-issue of the classic Woolrich amnesia mystery. It’s the latest gem in the ample offerings from American Mystery Classics. –DM

Heather Levy, This Violent Heart
(Montlake)

I adored Hurt For Me, Heather Levy’s sultry tale of kink and vengeance, and This Violent Heart should be just as compelling. In This Violent Heart, a woman returns to the conservative small town she blames for her childhood best friend’s suicide. She’s not happy to be back, but finds herself with a new sense of purpose when she learns her friend’s death may have actually been a murder. –MO

Ricardo Silva Romero, Rio Muerto
Translated by Victor Meadowcroft
(World Editions)

A murdered man’s ghost tells the story of his widow’s quest to confront the men who murdered him in this new novel from renowned Colombian author Ricardo Silva Romero. –DM

Mike Lawson, Untouchable
(Atlantic Monthly)

Joe DeMarco is back! When spoiled billionaire playboy Brendan Cartwright is found dead, it seems pretty likely that his death is the result of one of the many powerful, soulless people he partied with constantly. But then former Speaker of the House John Mahoney learns that there’s a chance the sitting President of the United States might have been involved with Cartwright’s death, he sends his fixer DeMarco to investigate. And boy does he! –OR

TJ Klune, The Bones Beneath My Skin
(Tor Books)

Klune has crafted a moving story of found family in this X-Files-influenced thriller perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World. The Bones Beneath My Skin follows Nate, a journalist at loose ends, who finds a mysterious girl and her hunky bodyguard hiding out in his family’s summer cabin. He soon joins them in their dangerous quest to reunite her with her family, as her former captors follow in hot pursuit. As fast-paced as it is warm-hearted! –MO

Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho
(Liveright)

Victorian Psycho is buckets of macabre fun, the story of a young governess stuck in the home of a twisted, wealthy family—and how she attempts to keep her violent fantasies of revenge, retribution, and good, old-fashioned cruelty at bay. That is, of course, until Christmas, when she’ll finally be able to give her employers the gifts that they so dearly deserve. It’s a real… “sleigh ride.” I’m so sorry. But not for telling you to go read it.  –OR

Isa Arsén, The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf
(Putnam)

Arsén’s sophomore effort is equal parts sultry and cultured, featuring two Shakespearian actors in a unusual but emotionally fulfilling marriage of convenience who find themselves in a sticky situation. They’ve been hired for a rather strange gig: an eccentric criminal has built a replica globe in the middle of the desert, and he’s ready to bring Shakespeare to life for his audience of one. At first, Margaret is merely there to tag along while her husband enjoys a leading role in Titus Andronicus; she’s recovering from a mental breakdown from the last time she starred in the Scottish Play. When she bonds with their benefactor, however, she finds herself reluctantly agreeing to give the lady one more try. When her marriage is threatened, she turns to her character to find the strength to do what needs to be done, in a perfectly-plotted denouement. –MO

Neena Viel, Listen to Your Sister
(St. Martin’s Griffin)

Neena Viel’s well-titled debut takes us into a loving but dysfunctional group of siblings at moment of crisis, then turns the tension up to the max. Mid-twenties Calla Williams is burdened by her role as her youngest brother’s guardian, and resentful of the middle child for his ability to get out of care-giving, but she’s also so terrified of losing her closest family that she’s tortured each night by visions of her siblings dying. When her teenage charge gets in trouble for actions at a protest, she takes the three of them on the road to a rented cabin to let the air clear—bringing along her nightmares, and the potential to destroy not only the tight-knit family, but reality itself. –MO

Sara Gran, Little Mysteries
(Dreamland Books)

Gran has rightly had a bit of a renaissance in the last few years, as Come Closer has found a new hungry group of readers. I’ve always been a fan of Gran’s Claire DeWitt mysteries—existential, elliptic, frustratingly human [positive]—and this new collection of short DeWitt stories (or DeWitt-adjacent stories) is like water in the desert. There’s a lot of play afoot here (including a cootie catcher story!) and that makes me all the more excited for Gran’s return to fiction after a few quiet years.  –Drew Broussard, Lit Hub Podcasts Editor

Emily J. Smith, Nothing Serious
(William Morrow)

In what reads as a referendum against the role of “female best friend for straight male narcissist”, a tech worker finds herself torn between loyalty and morality when her bestie dude bro is accused of murder, and she’s recruited as a character witness to prove how he’s actually, like, totally feminist. Nothing Serious is brutal, complex, and necessary, and joins the growing number of novels in which Silicon Valley is not an object of admiration, but of disgust. –MO

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MARCH

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Ashley Winstead, This Book Will Bury Me
(Sourcebooks)

Ashley Winstead has quickly become one of my favorite voices in the genre—there’s a polish to her characters that belies their hardened interiors and wounded pasts, their favored delusions and worst decisions. Her latest may feature her most interesting and complex heroine so far: an internet sleuth, mourning the loss of her father, throws herself into investigating the high profile murders of several sorority girls, and in the process does something terribly wrong. Many authors have taken a stab at capturing the complex and exploitative ins and outs of the true crime industry and its many cold case warriors, but Winstead’s is my favorite take yet. –MO

Patrick Hoffman, Friends Helping Friends
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

An everyman with a sideline dealing steroids gets pressed into undercover service to avoid jail time and soon finds himself plunged into a world of racism, violence, and toxic masculinity in Patrick Hoffman’s latest crime saga. Hoffman is one of the best writers at work today in crime, and here, with his sights trained squarely on the rise of white nationalist movements, he’s providing readers with an absolutely startling experience. –DM

Silvia Park, Luminous
(Simon and Schuster)

A United Korea in the nearish future is the setting for Silvia Park’s deeply human take on artificial life. The estranged children of a robotics pioneer are reunited by the search for a missing, and rare, robot unit, one who may lead them to their sorely missed, and entirely artificial, brother. –MO

Erika T. Wurth, The Haunting of Room 904
(Flatiron)

Erika T. Wurth, who wrote 2022’s splendid White Horse, is back with a wonderful, wholly inventive new horror novel, about a young woman who (following the death of her clairvoyant sister), finds herself able to commune with spirits—and is called to investigate a phenomenon in a Denver Hotel, where, every few years, a girl is found dead in the same hotel room, no matter what room she checked into. (I love this premise.) What follows is a simmering, sinister, and transportive journey through a kaleidoscopic, metaphysical and memorial world. –OR

Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York
(Celadon)

Elon Green is a sensitive chronicler of the suffering of New Yorkers and their attempts to seek justice from an imperfect, and often actively corrupt, system, and his new book is no exception. The Man Nobody Killed explores the artistic underground of 1980s NYC at a shocking moment in which one of their own—a Black graffiti artist who ran in the same circles as Basquiat and Madonna—was brutally murdered by police while out tagging. The crime was immediately recognizable to the community as racially motivated, sparking a sea of protest against police violence and radicalizing many of the witnesses to the brutal attack. –MO

Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
(S&S/Saga Press)

Sit up, everyone: Stephen Graham Jones has a new novel! It’s about the discovery of a diary written by a white Lutheran pastor in 1912—a diary which chronicles, over several visits, an interview with a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab in which he explains his lifelong quest for revenge.  –OR

Hallie Rubenhold, Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen
(Dutton)

Hallie Rubenhold writes some of the most engaging nonfiction around; her works display an incredible mastery of the rhythms of the past and the quirks of history’s denizens. Here, she explores a shocking murder in turn-of-the-century New York’s glittering demimonde–when a popular chanteuse goes missing, suspicion quickly falls upon her doctor husband, whose reputation for quackery hides far more sinister intentions. –MO

Jean Echenoz, Command Performance
Translated by Mark Polizotti
(NYRB)

This book is very French, by which I mean a bizarre melange of genre tropes, literary tangents, and surreal cynicism. Perhaps the best way to describe this book is as the kind of existential detective novel that would have made a great indie film in the mid-aughts (Jason Schwartzman, are you reading this?). In Command Performance, a former flight attendant takes a turn as a PI; his gross ineptitude and a series of strange coincidences then lead him to a new career in politics, and eventually, a mission to assassinate the head of his own party. –MO

Ron Currie,The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne
(Putnam)

Ron Currie doing a big family crime novel seems like a ticket to a great time to me. It features a iron-willed Franco-American matriarch (the titular Babs) defending her territory (a small town in Maine) and her family from enemies foreign and domestic. I have the feeling it’s going to come together in a big messy blast, as all good crime denouements should do.  –DB

Deanna Raybourn, Kills Well with Others
(Berkley)

Deanna Raybourn’s charming sequel to Killers of a Certain Age is finally here! Our four favorite senior lady assassins Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are back. They are laying low but growing restless… but then they learn of the perfect job and swing back into action. I cannot even tell you how much of a vacation these books are. –OR

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APRIL

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Rav Grewal-Kök, The Snares
(Random House)

The Snares may be the most cynical take on government actions I’ve ever come across. In Rav Grewal-Kök’s brilliant and tragic sendoff of the post-9/11 world, a bored bureaucrat is recruited to approve suggested targets for the nascent drone program, and instead finds himself set up as the patsy for a deeply racist and bloodthirsty initiative. If Graham Greene had written a Shakespearian tragedy, it would read something like this.  –MO

Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home
(Tor Nightfire)

When FDR said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he could never have imagined someone would take that thought to so logical—and extreme—a conclusion as this, and yet Cassidy’s latest works well on every level. Cassidy’s protagonist is a struggling improv comedian working graveyard shifts at the local diner and wondering how she’ll make rent. Within the first few pages, she’s transformed into the protector of a lost little boy with terrifying enemies & even more terrifying powers. The conclusion feels shattering, inevitable, and completely of our time—by which I mean, very bleak indeed. –MO

Maha Khan Phillips, The Museum Detective
(Soho)

This book is so cool! As the Museum Detective begins, an archaeologist gets a call from the police to identify a body—specifically, a mummy preserved in a highly unusual sarcophagus that just about everyone would like to get their hands on, for profit or for politics. –MO

Liann Zhang, Julie Chan Is Dead
(Atria)

Julie Chan was separated from her twin sister Chloe after a horrendous car crash left them orphaned; Chloe’s adoption by a wealthy white family gave her the in to become a hugely successful influencer, while Julie, raised by a cantankerous and cruel aunt, has a terrible job and few prospects for the future. That is, until she finds her sister’s corpse and decides to take over Chloe’s life with the glitterati. Julie is, of course, signing up for something much darker—hilariously so, in a way that would transfer quite well to the big (or small) screen. Perfect inspiration for a social media cleanse! –MO

Yigit Turhan, Their Monstrous Hearts
(MIRA)

Butterfly horror!! In the English-language debut from Turkish-Italian writer Yigit Turhan, a young novelist beset by mounting bills and stymied by writer’s block heads to Milan, where he has inherited his grandmother’s luxurious estate. When he finds a notebook hidden in the walls purporting to tell his grandmother’s life story, he begins to understand the shiftier implications of her meteoric rise, and strange demise. A well-crafted and rather moving parable about dark bargains and cruel sacrifices. And butterflies. –MO

Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker 
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

From a former New Yorker fact checker comes this debut novel about a magazine fact checker and a missing woman. The novel follows an odyssey through New York and strikes a perfect balance of mystery, humor, and literary ingenuity. –DM

Abigail Dean, The Death of Us
(Viking)

Abigail Dean has already proven to be a skilled observer of ordinary humans in extraordinary circumstances, and her latest is her most affecting study yet. A once-happy couple reunites after decades of estrangement when the man who once broke into their home and tortured them finally goes to trial. The love they shared wasn’t enough to keep them together after their ordeal, but perhaps the act of seeing their tormentor brought to justice will finally bring the two of them back together. –MO

Lauren Haddad, Fireweed
(Astra)

Set in Prince George in Canada’s version of the rust belt, Fireweed follows a stifled housewife as she searches for her missing neighbor, a widowed mother of two and the only indigenous woman in the neighborhood. What follows is a complex examination of injustice, performativity, and intersectionality. –MO

Elizabeth Kaufman, Ruth Run
(Penguin Press)

Kaufman’s heroine is a clever digital thief who’s managed to steal millions from banks across the nation and stashed her winnings across the world. When one of her transfers trips an alarm, she grabs her blond wig and her bundles of cash and goes on the run. Can she escape the men following her? And do they want to recover the stolen money, or are they more interested in the thief herself? Elizabeth Kaufman uses her time in the tech industry and deep knowledge of information networks to inform the plot without detracting from the relentless forward motion of her story. –MO

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption
(Del Rey)

Robert Jackson Bennett’s immersive world-building, engaging characterizations, and intricate mysteries are once again on display in this second mystery to feature the Watson-and-Sherlock duo of Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol, investigators for a vast empire full of cruel masters and strange magicks. This book was so fucking creepy and good. Y’all all need to read it so we can all talk about the shroud. –MO

Lindy Ryan, Another Fine Mess
(Minotaur)

Lindy Ryan’s Bless Your Heart first introduced her vampire-slaying funeral-parlor-owning small-town-Texas heroines, and now the Evans women return for another installment of burying the dead and fighting the undead, but this time around they’re not just dealing with the supernatural. Reads like if your favorite aunt was Buffy’s watcher. –MO

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MAY

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Maud Ventura, Make Me Famous
Translated by Gretchen Schmid 
(HarperVia)

In this gripping saga of a pop star’s grueling rise to the top, fame is not for the faint-hearted. Maud Ventura blew me away with My Husband (especially that last page!) and Make Me Famous, a Highsmith-esque thriller following a singer’s brutal, callous efforts to become pop star royalty, should be just as viciously delightful. –MO

Daniel Kehlmann, The Director
Translated by Ross Benjamin
(Simon and Schuster / Summit Books)

The new novel from the internationally renowned Kehlmann centers on the turbulent life and art of G.W. Pabst, the Austrian screenwriter and director. Kehlmann’s novel traces Pabst’s journey fleeing from Nazi Germany, through the Hollywood doldrums, and back to Austria, where he’s soon recruited by Joseph Goebbels to produce propaganda films for the Reich. –DM

Adam Oyebanji, Esperance
(DAW)

Adam Oyebanji has crafted another brilliant melange of science fiction and murder mystery, with a heady dose of Afrofuturism thrown into the mix. In a seemingly impossible crime, a number of bodies are found drowned in seawater, and far from the ocean. Meanwhile, a woman with strange talents and even stranger technologies seeks information related to a singular 18th-century voyage marked by disaster and cruelty. The Esperance does something very tricky, and does it quite well indeed. –MO

Paul Vidich, The Poet’s Game
(Pegasus)

Vidich, one of today’s premier spy novelists, is back with a sophisticated new thriller about the former head of Moscow Station, now called back to duty for the proverbial one more job. Vidich paints a vivid portrait of the lives caught up in the inter-agency scheming and masterfully raises the stakes at every turn. For smart espionage fiction with a human touch, Vidich is in a class of his own. –DM

Brendan Slocumb, The Dark Maestro
(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

David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark, The Butcher’s Daughter
(Hell’s Hundred)

While 2025 is simply flooded with cannibals in fiction,there’s only one featuring the maker of meat pies herself: Mrs. Lovett. How ever did the mysterious matron of Sweeney Todd get her gruesome start in the world? Perhaps it began with her happy childhood in a butcher shop, a happiness ending abruptly upon the death of her father and the newly dangerous circum­stances of her life—first as a maid to a dangerous master, and later as a prisoner in a convent determined to tell her sorry tale to any and all sympathetic listeners. –MO

Matt Serafini, Feeders
(Gallery)

One of several books out this year that interrogates how far people are willing to go in the name of social media views, but by far the most graphically disturbing (yes, the dog does die). When a wannabe influencer gains access to an exclusive new social media site, she soon discovers that to go viral with viewers, she needs to go extreme with her content. Truly vicious and not for the faint of heart—just like the social media metrics that inspired it. –MO

Christina Li, The Manor of Dreams
(Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster)

Christina Lee’s debut is a lushly crafted haunted house gothic, full of family secrets and forbidden romance and grounded in Hollywood’s long history of racism & patriarchy. When the first Asian-American woman to win an Oscar dies after a lengthy estrangement from her daughters, she leaves her crumbling estate to the child of her former employees. Her own daughters refuse to accept the will’s startling stipulations without a fight, and as the families complete biltong over the manor, supernatural forces work to reveal hidden truths and enact violent revenge for past injustices. Lee has a talent for understanding the human impulses behind villainous destruction—everyone is understood,but none shall be forgiven. Added to this adage is a sincere belief in the power of love, and an emphasis on the need for honesty in bearing the weight of history. –MO

Lila Cain, The Blackbirds of St Giles
(Dafina)

A Black soldier who served with the British during the American Revolution heads to England with his sister to claim his inheritance after a surprise windfall. Instead, the two siblings find themselves robbed and stranded in the poorest section of early 19th century London, a slum known as the “rookery”, and fall under the tyrannical sway of the local crime boss. Cain’s novel paints a fascinating and immersive portrait of London’s substantial Black community in the Georgian Era, full of compelling characters, rich detail, and lush set-pieces. Also Lila Cain is in fact two people—Kate Griffin and Marcia Hutchinson—and I love to recommend a good collaboration! –MO

Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints
(Harper Voyager)

A castle under siege and about to run out of food is the setting for Starling’s latest. When mysterious strangers arrive promising victory and sustenance, the defenders let them in, but at what cost? And what bargains must be struck to be rid of them? This book was messed up (in the best way). –MO

Laura Leffler, Tell Them You Lied
(Hyperion Avenue)

This book looks like “Bad Art Friend” on steroids and I cannot WAIT to dive in. Laura Leffler’s novel examines the intense artistic and personal competition between two strivers in New York City, one of whom  is suspected of foul play after the other goes missing in the chaos of 9/11.  –MO

Andrea Bartz, The Last Ferry Out
(Ballantine)

Andrea Bartz is at the top of her game in this moody thriller set on a remote Mexican island full of secretive vacationers. Bartz’s narrator isn’t on vacation, though—she’s there to find out more about her fiancee’s last days, and learn if there’s a wider story behind her partner’s shocking death from food allergens. –MO

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JUNE AND BEYOND

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Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners
(Viking)

Megan Abbott, El Dorado Drive
(Putnam)

In Megan Abbott’s provocative new thriller about a group of women committed to helping one another financially, things take a dark turn when the lives of two sisters are put in jeopardy. Abbott is among the most gifted stylists at work in crime fiction today, and she brings a poetic appreciation for flawed humanity to her new novel, which is as atmospheric and compelling as any of her best books. –DM

Erin Dunn, He’s to Die For
(Minotaur)

I’m about halfway through this one and I am shipping those leads. Billed as “Brooklyn-99 but make it queer romance”, He’s to Die For features a debonair detective who’s falling head over heels for a rock star—one who just happens to be suspected of murder. And if they don’t get together, I may be forced to *sigh* write some fan fiction. –MO

Dwyer Murphy, The House on Buzzards Bay
(Viking)

You can always count on CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Dwyer Murphy for atmospheric, clever, and thoroughly engrossing novels, and I have no doubt that his latest—though the galley has not yet graced my desk—will be as good as I’ve come to expect. It concerns a group of middle-aged friends, brought back together for a reunion in the titular house on Buzzards Bay, all fun and games until one of them (the writer, of course) disappears. Then there are the mysterious break-ins in the town, the odd happenings in the house, the stranger at the door—yep, it’s a Dwyer Murphy novel, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.  –Emily Temple, Lit Hub Managing Editor

Ruth Ware, The Woman in Suite 11
(Gallery/Scout)

I’m very much looking forward to reading The Woman in Suite 11, Ruth Ware’s highly anticipated sequel to The Woman in Cabin 10. Lo Blacklock, the unlucky heroine of Ware’s cruise ship thriller, is back to work as a journalist after half a decade spent raising her young children. She’s been invited to a very special hotel opening in Geneva, Switzerland, which will, we assume, go disastrously wrong. –MO

Lucas Schaefer, The Slip
(Simon & Schuster)

“For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.” Intrigued? Of course you are, and you should be. Lucas Schaefer’s big, bold, raunchy, tender, comic, philosophical, Austin-set boxing novel is also an unflinching examination of race and sex in America. It’s absolutely bursting with memorable characters and outrageous scenes, and the sentence level writing is nothing short of superb. Truly one of the most impressive debuts I’ve read in years, The Slip is a knockout.  –Dan Sheehan, BookMarks Editor-in-Chief

Ivy Pochoda, Ecstasy
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

In Pochoda’s new novel, a wealthy woman trapped in a stifling marriage soon becomes a widow, only to find herself again trapped, this time by her controlling son. But a trip to a new development, and the nearby call of a group of women living on the beach, soon stir something in her soul, unleashing an uncanny series of events. Pochoda’s turn into horror and mythology will bring ample rewards to her readers. –DM

Joe Pan, Florida Palms
(Simon & Schuster)

In this debut novel, a group of friends in need of work move into the orbit of a biker gang and start running designer drugs up and down the East Coast. It’s a dark coming-of-age novel with ambitious scope and a compelling set of characters. –DM

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching
(Del Rey)

In Moreno-Garcia’s chilling new novel, a graduate student researching a horror novelist delves into a life-altering mystery and the strange forces surrounding a certain manuscript that ties it all together. Witchcraft and the power of narrative intersect to yield this evocative, powerful tale. –DM

Melissa Pace, The Once and Future Me
(Henry Holt)

This book will blow your mind!!!! It kind of felt like a Marvel movie, but like, one that’s actually good! Pace’s amnesiac heroine, locked up in a mental institution and subjected to strange experimental procedures, must escape her padded prison and find out what exactly she’s forgotten, and what role her husband has played in all this, well, madness. I cannot tell you more without spoilers, but even as someone who reads 150+ books a year, I was genuinely surprised. –MO

Eli Cranor, Mississippi Blue 42
(Soho) 

Cranor’s new novel channels Elmore Leonard through the world of dark money college football, as a newly minted FBI agent is assigned to track down a shadowy cabal in central Mississippi pouring dirty money into a football-obsessed community. Cranor’s prose has never been sharper and he knows this world inside and out. This is quite likely the most fun you’ll have with a crime book all year. –DM