NYT Thrillers 2025

Chicky Diaz stands on his little patch of the earth, the clean quiet sidewalk in front of the Bohemia Apartments, there sure are a lot of great places to kill someone in this city.Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, New York City’s world-famous home of celebrities, financiers, and the cultural elite.Chicky serves at the pleasure of residents like Emily Longworth, who, up in her penthouse, leads a life of her perfect kids in her perfect home, her perfect worries about museum boards, charity work, and so on. Emily’s husband, though perfectly wealthy, is someone she has quietly loathed since well before the revelations that he’s a private-equity war profiteer. But their marriage came with an iron-clad prenup, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave all that. Yet.Meanwhile, in apartment 2A, there’s nothing perfect about Julian Sonnenberg’s middle-aged life. Already struggling with the indignities of turning fifty—a stale marriage, teenage kids who no longer need him, his work as an art gallerist making him feel culturally obsolete—and now his doctor tells him that he needs open-heart surgery, immediately. Things are falling apart awfully fast.In the basement staff room, the life-and-death stakes of daily life are hardly news to the primarily Black and Latino hospitality staff. So when the NYPD fatally shoots an unarmed Black man and the streets swell with both protesters and counterprotesters, the staff’s concerns are less about the building and more about their survival—and what justice will look like.Enter Chicky in his epauletted suit, manning the line between the turbulent streets outside the Bohemia and the far more sanguine world within. The Bohemia’s residents don’t care much (except maybe Emily Longworth), but Chicky has his own problems—the kind that mean that for tonight’s shift, for the first time in thirty years, he will be carrying a gun. Because someone, tonight, is going to die.The Doorman is a book about class and privilege in a city poised to boil over its proverbial melting pot, and the ever-starker divisions testing everything the city likes to believe about itself.

A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their newly purchased home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, he revels in the Portuguese capital’s temperate weather and the neighborhood’s calm, meticulously planning the details of their future.Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can’t explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings?A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, Your Steps on the Stairs explores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Muñoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.Heady and unsettling, a couple’s new life in Lisbon unravels in this psychological thriller from one of Spain’s most celebrated writers.

A masterful, enthralling new novel from the Booker Prize winnerEverything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me . . . 1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman--a hack, by his own description--marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune and lead a comfortable, settled life. But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch’s death, leads to her disinheritance.The unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice to celebrate the New Year at the Palazzo Dioscuri, ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo. From their first moments at the palazzo, a series of seemingly otherworldly occurrences begin to accumulate. Evelyn’s already frayed nerves disintegrate could it be the mist blanketing the floating city, or is he losing his mind?Venetian Vespers is a haunting, atmospheric noir with a surprise around every cobwebbed a fitting return by one of the most sophisticated stylists of our time.

1926. On the cliffs of Yorkshire, men are lowered on ropes to steal the eggs of the sea birds who nest there. The most beautiful are sold for large sums. A small girl—penniless and neglected by her family—retrieves one such treasure. Its discovery will forever alter the course of her life.A century later. In a remote cottage in Wales, Patrick Fort finds his friend, Nick, and his mother tied up and robbed. The only thing missing: a carved case containing an incredible scarlet egg. Doggedly attempting to retrieve it, Patrick and Nick discover the cruel world of egg trafficking, and soon find themselves on the trail of a priceless collection of eggs lost to history. Until now.How do you find something that doesn’t exist? A taut, wonderfully imagined novel brimming with skullduggery at every turn, The Impossible Thing is a blazing testament to Belinda Bauer’s status as one of our greatest living crime writers.EndorsementsFrom the exceptionally original mind of CWA Gold Dagger Award winner and Booker longlisted author Belinda Bauer comes this sweeping tale of obsession, greed, ambition, and a crime that has remained unsolved for a hundred years.

Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It's the loneliest she's ever felt in her life.When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn't losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she's told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.Led by Hassan and his technological marvels, Maggie breaks into her husband's mind, probing the depths of his past in an effort to save him. The deeper she dives, the more she unravels a mystery spanning continents and centuries, each layer more complex than the last.But Hassan cannot be trusted. Not just memories are disappearing, but pieces of reality itself. If Maggie cannot find out what Stanley did all those years ago, and what Hassan is after now, she risks far more than her husband's life. The very course of human history hangs in the balance.A woman dives into her husband's memories to uncover a decades-old feud threatening reality itself in this staggering technothriller from the bestselling author of Ascension.

A shocking murder in the New Zealand bush—and the witness who looks all too familiar—draws a woman back to the very place she swore she’d never return to in this breakneck debut thriller.A child who ran from the forest.A woman who must return to itGrowing up with her younger siblings in the unforgiving New Zealand bush, Effie believed their parents had cut them off from civilization because they loved Nature. She never suspected that their reasons might be more menacing. After witnessing a terrifying episode of violence, she escaped the wilderness to forge a life for herself halfway across the globe.Now, when she learns the only witness to a murder is a little girl who looks just like her, Effie is compelled to return to the scene of her troubled childhood, where the secrets of her upbringing and the terrors of her past come rushing back to the surface. In order to find out once and for all what became of her family—and possibly help this mysterious girl who could be her younger self—Effie must face her greatest fears once more.

Over the course of one sunbaked summer vacation, a family is pulled into a web of mysteries that the younger daughter sets out to solve. A tense, page-turning debut of childhood, innocence, and evil.At ten years old, she notices more than her parents and older sister suspect. Over their summer break, her mother plans to finish her novel, her father wants to grill and watch cricket, and her fifteen-year-old sister hopes to catch the eye of a local lifeguard. With everyone around her distracted, she teams up with a new friend to solve a mystery that haunts this vacation: they'll try to close the case of what happened to Charlotte, a child who was presumed drowned two years earlier.But things aren't quite as they seem, and as the children look for clues, they inadvertently dislodge information they wish they'd never uncovered. Are her parents happy together? Is her sister putting her trust in the wrong people? Is their vacation rental as safe as it seems? And when someone else goes missing, the family finds themselves at the center of an urgent police investigation.Debut novelist Jennifer Trevelyan viscerally captures the confusion and frustration of childhood, the fraught but unshakeable bond between sisters, and the dangers that lurk in the white lies we tell — especially about the people we love most.

In this provocative mystery from beloved crime writer Denise Mina, new evidence in an old murder case leads a forensic scientist to an impossible choice.Doctor Claudia O'Sheil is approaching the podium at an elegant fundraiser, where she is expected to give a speech about how her forensic science evidence helped convict the brutal killer in her most famous case, The Incident at Chester Terrace, a sensational double-murder that ignited the country just one year before.But the research has moved on. The evidence Claudia gave was junk science, used to put William Stewart away for the murder of his father and his girlfriend. Because of her, an innocent man is in prison, and she didn’t act alone—some very powerful people have an agenda she is only beginning to understand. This speech might be her last chance to reveal the truth and catch the real murderer. But admitting her mistake will cost her reputation, her career, her home, security for her two sons, the esteem of her colleagues, and the pride of a nation obsessed with her success.Interwoven with the present-day framework is a past narrative that slowly reveals what actually happened the night of a devastating double-murder in a wealthy family.As Claudia steps toward the microphone, she revisits the murder investigation, desperate to understand what went wrong before her chance is gone. What speech will Claudia give? And what really happened at Chester Terrace that night?Would you still do the right thing if you knew it would cost everything you loved?

1963, Guatemala. The country is in turmoil, with a presidential election looming and a charismatic, left-wing ex-priest and trade union leader predicted to win. United Fruits, a giant American corporation responsible for a large percentage of the country’s GNP, meanwhile, is not pleased by this prospect. Neither is the CIA. Amid the uncertainty, Gabriel Dax arrives on orders from his MI6 handler Faith Green, who has tasked him with assessing the fallout from the election.Upon arrival, Gabriel meets Frank Sartorius, the local CIA agent. Despite Sartorius’s genial manner, Gabriel suspects something untrustworthy brewing under the surface. Soon, a political assassination with suspicions of Mafia involvement leads to riots, and Dax escapes to Europe, thinking he will finally return to his normal life as a travel writer. But when Green compels him to investigate some shady characters in West Berlin, it becomes clear that an even greater danger is afoot as the magnetic young President Kennedy prepares to arrive for a state visit.A gripping novel of politics and spy craft with dramatic twists and turns, The Predicament shows Boyd to be one of our most masterful contemporary storytellers.Endorsements“Boyd is one of my favorite authors.” — Kate Atkinson

Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan?It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who’s in trouble, kidnap and death are hot on their heels once more. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code, and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into action once more, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?