14 New Thrillers Everyone Is Loving Right Now (You’ll Want These on Your TBR ASAP)

If you’re looking for popular 2026 thrillers everyone is talking about right now, this list is a good place to start. I’ve already shared upcoming 2026 thrillers before, but these are the ones getting real buzz and I’ve already read a few early.

These fast-paced thrillers with shocking twists are the ones readers can’t stop recommending. If you love that “just one more chapter” feeling, these are the books you’ll want on your 2026 TBR ASAP.

Also read

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25 Thriller Books I Can’t Wait to Read in 2026
19 New Thriller Books Coming In 2026
29 Binge-Worthy Thrillers Everyone’s Reading Right Now
Highly Anticipated Spring Mystery Thrillers 2025

New Thrillers Everyone Is Loving Right Now

How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson

This fresh debut thriller finds a Scotland Yard detective trying to find the author of a self-help book that promises quite literally to teach readers how to get away with murder, which seems to have inspired London’s newest murderer.

Detective Inspector Samantha Hansen has been on leave for six months, recovering from a breakdown she suffered at work, but when a fourteen-year-old girl is murdered in a local park, Sam jumps at the chance to return to the job and prove that she’s still got what it takes to be the Yard’s most successful homicide detective. One of the cases only leads is a copy of a self-help book found in the victim’s backpack called How To Get Away With Murder by a man named Denver Brady.

Brady claims to be the most successful serial killer of our time, which is why no one’s ever heard of him. Chapter by chapter, he details his methodology and his past victims, and as Sam’s investigation progresses and the details of the book go viral, Sam begins to suspect that there’s more to the author than what he’s revealed. But in order to find a killer and get justice for young Charlotte, Sam must learn to trust her instincts once again, before Denver Brady–or someone else–really does get away with murder.

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I’m Not the Only Murderer in My Retirement Home by Fergus Craig

After a decades-long stint in prison, former serial killer Carol is looking to kick back and relax in her new retirement home…until a fellow resident drops dead and Carol has to prove she actually didn’t do it this time….

Carol is delighted to be leaving her tiny prison cell behind to take her place in a luxury retirement home. She’s hoping her past as a serial killer won’t come to light so she can make a few friends and find some murder-free hobbies. But it’s not long before a fellow resident—who happens to be a former police commissioner—drops dead, and Carol’s true identity is leaked—making catching up over daily activities of bingo and baking rather awkward.

Just her luck, Carol soon realizes that the victim wasn’t the only former law enforcement officer at Sheldon Oaks—it’s filled to the brim with former cops, barristers, and government representatives, her newfound friends included. And everyone thinks Carol’s guilt is a no-brainer, but she is ready to prove them dead wrong…without killing anyone, for once.

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Trust No One by James Rollins

From the #1 New York Times bestselling master of international intrigue comes a shocking new stand-alone thriller that thrusts a group of university students, falsely accused of murder, into a treacherous hunt across Europe, all to unlock the secrets buried within a centuries-old book that could change humankind forever.

Knowledge can be magic—until it falls into the wrong hands.

The ritualistic murder of a British professor at the University of Exeter points to a startling cast of his own students. All are enrolled in a postgraduate program covering the history of witchcraft, folklore, and spiritualism.

All evidence points to Sharyn Karr—an American student. Prior to the professor’s death, he had thrust a centuries-old book upon her. It appears to be the handwritten and encrypted diary of an eighteenth-century mystic and occultist, the Comte de Saint-Germain. The professor begged her to keep the text safe, ending with a warning.

Trust no one.

Such a responsibility forces her into cooperation with Duncan Maxwell, a fellow postgrad and the sixteenth in line to the British Crown. Already, Duncan has proven himself a savant with encryptions. Unfortunately, the pair clash at every level, but they both need one another. Especially when they discover the book’s opening Herein lies the secret to my immortality. Come find me, if you dare.

As dark forces close upon the pair, she and her friends are forced to flee, pursued by law enforcement and hunted by a powerful cabal. In an explosive chase across Europe—from the Tower of London to Parisian chateaus to a fortress in the Italian Alps—Sharyn must learn the true secret hidden in Saint-Germain’s text. It will send her and the others across history and deep into the heart of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a secret buried at the roots of Western Civilization, a discovery that could topple empires and change humanity forever.

For what lies at the end of Saint-Germain’s diary is as shocking as its opening words.

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The Fourth Princess by Janie Chang

From the internationally bestselling author of The Porcelain Moon comes a haunting Gothic novel set in 1911 China. Two young women living in a crumbling, once-grand Shanghai mansion face danger as secrets of their pasts come to light, even as the mansion’s own secret threatens the present.

Shanghai, 1911. Lisan Liu is elated when she is hired as secretary to wealthy American Caroline Stanton, the new mistress of Lennox Manor on the outskirts of Shanghai’s International Settlement. However, the Manor has a dark past due to a previous owner’s suicide, and soon Lisan’s childhood nightmares resurface with more intensity and meld with haunted visions of a woman in red. Adding to her unease is the young gardener, Yao, who both entices and disturbs her.

Newly married Caroline looks forward to life in China with her husband, Thomas, away from the shadows of another earlier tragedy. But an unwelcome guest, Andrew Grey, attends her party and claims to know secrets she can’t afford to have exposed. At the same party, the notorious princess Masako Kyo approaches Lisan with questions about the young woman’s family that the orphaned Lisan can’t answer.

As Caroline struggles with Grey’s extortion and Thomas’s mysterious illness, Lisan’s future is upended when she learns the truth about her past, and why her identity has been hidden all these years. All the while, strange incidents accelerate, driving Lisan to doubt her sanity as Lennox Manor seems unwilling to release her until she fulfills demands from beyond the grave.

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The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera

When the last fare of the night turns up dead in her backseat, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver works off the clock to clear her name in this mystery novel by debut author Yosha Gunasekera.

Siriwathi Perera doesn’t quite know where she’s going in life. She never expected to be a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at twenty-eight. The true-crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself, or the brother she’s grieving.

When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they make a quick connection through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri, whose social circle is limited to her grade-school best friend, Alex, thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship. But she’s suddenly dropped into her own true crime when she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected.

Pinned as the obvious and only suspect, and desperate to clear her name, Siri chases down leads across the boroughs of New York City with Amaya’s help. But with her court date looming, they have just five days to find out who really killed the midnight passenger—or Siri’s life will be over before she can even truly live it.

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The Found Object Society by Michelle Maryk

An atmospheric speculative suspense novel following a mysterious society offering its members the chance to relive the death of another person whenever they want—and the self-destructive woman determined to uncover its secrets

This ambitious, genre-bending debut is perfect for fans of time-travel fiction including Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors

A Publisher’s Marketplace Spring/Summer 2026 Buzz Book!

A People Best Books of February 2026!

An Allstora Shelf Care Society Book Club Pick!

For twenty years, Greta Davenport has lived with the guilt of surviving the accident that killed her parents. She’s tested the limits of her own mortality ever since, but little gives her the dopamine rush she craves. Not until the night she almost drunkenly crashes her car into a tree, and a peculiar blank card slides under her front door—an invitation to the Found Object Society. What she discovers there is beyond comprehension: an opulent, subterranean playground filled with aisles of objects from different eras and regions of the world. Pick an object and go on a voyage to relive the final moments of the person who died holding it, along with an unparalleled, irreplicable high. Greta’s hooked, but she can’t quiet her questions about the society and its enigmatic creators, the answers to which have implications far beyond her growing dependence on the voyages. Death is addictive, and what she uncovers will put her entire life into question.

A fever dream of a novel with episodic, time-traveling chapters told from multiple points of view, The Found Object Society examines the depraved whims of the ultrarich and the breadth of unresolved trauma—all while asking how grief and the choices we make in its aftermath can change the course of our lives. Michelle Maryk’s wholly original and ambitious debut opens an impeccably wrought speculative world of greed, power, and destiny.

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The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui

Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding.

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy and guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI construct for companionship.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earth’s dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.
Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship.

But the ship’s plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI construct may be their only hope for survival

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The Fall of Iris Henley by Jennifer Graham

For fans of Megan Lally and Kara Thomas, a twisty thriller about a Texas teen accused of murder who’s desperate to clear her name.

All it takes to ruin someone’s life is the stroke of a key. Just ask Iris Henley. Her life is destroyed when someone posts an anonymous message on her high school’s subreddit thread: “Iris Henley is a killer. I’ve been too scared to come forward until now, but I saw her murder Rocky and Lynette last summer.”

Just like that, Iris loses everything. Her reputation. Her friends. Her hope of getting into college on scholarship. Even, possibly, her freedom, once the police start to investigate. After all, she’s the perfect suspect: Rocky was her boyfriend, and Lynette was her ex-best friend—and the girl he was cheating on her with. But Iris didn’t do it, and now it’s up to her to clear her name by finding out who did—before it’s too late.

Propulsive, sharp, and absolutely twisty from the New York Times bestselling author who brought readers the Veronica Mars duology, Jennifer Graham’s YA thriller is unputdownable.

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Murder at 30,000 Feet by Susan Walter

Under the cover of turbulence, a killer strikes. With nowhere to land and nowhere to hide, who will save the passengers from this nightmare at 30,000 feet?

It’s a ticket to paradise. Flight 868 with nonstop service to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Over a dozen tipsy passengers are off to a destination wedding. A team of high school baseball players are headed to a tournament. The plane is packed with people eager to escape their lives, and others who can’t wait to return to their beloved home.

But sweet anticipation turns to terror when a lightning strike short-circuits the avionics and plunges the plane into darkness. When the lights come back on, a passenger is found brutally murdered, with only a bewildered air marshal to solve the crime. He soon realizes that several passengers are harboring dark secrets, but the identity of the murderer eludes him. There’s only one certainty: the killer is on the plane.

Thousands of feet above the earth with thunderstorms closing in, the danger outside is as grave as the mounting threat within. Can the captain outrun the storm? Or will the murderer among them bring the plane down first?

Passion, betrayal, and murder collide in this high-stakes, locked-room mystery. A must-listen for fans of T.J. Newman and Jeneva Rose.

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They Call Her Regret by Channelle Desamours

In this young adult speculative mystery, a teen must find a way to free a cursed witch in order to save her best friend before time runs out.

Every year horror-loving Simone Washington throws an epic Halloween party for her classmates. Party-planning is her favorite escape from the dark secrets in her past, and this year, she’s taking things up a notch with an invitation-only event to celebrate her eighteenth birthday—something that will leave the halls of Pinegrove Academy flooded with gossip about the big ghoulish bash. The overnight stay at Doll’s Head Lake will be filled with spooky pranks and scary stories told by the fire—including the legend of a local witch named Regret.

But those dark secrets from Simone’s past are forced to the surface at the party when her best friend Kira dies under questionable circumstances. The witch appears and offers Simone a deal: if Simone can figure out how to release Regret from the curse trapping her at the lake within fourteen days, all of Simone’s regrets will be erased. If Simone accepts, Kira’s life will be immediately restored. But if she fails, Kira will die again—and Simone will be the one to kill her.

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Worse than a Lie by Ben Crump

In this gripping thriller, truth and justice are called into question when a Black man is gunned down in cold blood—the first novel in a riveting series from renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

“A sensationally good crime and legal thriller . . . This is exactly what a book should be.”—Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of the Reacher series

It’s the night of November 4, 2008. America’s first Black president has just been elected. And fifty-three-year-old Hollis Montrose—a Black ex–police officer from the suburbs of Chicago—has become the latest victim of a brutal attack. As the result of a traffic stop gone wrong, Hollis is shot ten times in cold blood, by four white men who could have been his colleagues back in his police days.

Beau Lee Cooper was born serious, as if on an urgent mission with little time to waste. Raised in the tumultuous world of 1970s Texas, he always dreamed of becoming a lawyer and fighting for what’s right, ever since he was a little boy reading To Kill a Mockingbird. And now, ten years into running his own law firm with his best friend and partner in crime, Nelson “Nellie” Rivers, and his suave right-hand-man, Brent “Cape” Capers, he feels he’s finally making a difference. When Beau Lee learns about Hollis’s situation, he’s determined to help.

Miraculously, Hollis survives the encounter, but the Chicago police department has already spun the narrative in its favor, and Hollis is given a wrongful prison sentence with an unreasonable bail. What really happened that night the car was pulled over? Was it random or was Hollis targeted? Beau Lee knows he’s treading in dangerous waters, and finding evidence of the truth will be his biggest challenge yet, but with troubling powers at play, one innocent man’s life hangs in the balance.

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The Ghost Women by Jennifer Murphy

A mysterious art academy in the woods, a deck of ancient tarot cards, a centuries-old secret

On a hot August morning in 1972, the body of Abel Montague, a student at St. Luke’s Institute of the Arts, is found hanging from a tree in the forest. An ancient Hanged Man tarot card is found in the back pocket of his pants and his body has been positioned into the exact pose illustrated on the card.

When Detective Lola Germany arrives at St. Luke’s—a former monastery that once housed a secret order of monks who carried out witch trials and executions—she believes they are dealing with a ritualistic murder. While interviewing school administrators and Abel’s classmates, Lola discovers Abel’s live-in girlfriend, Pearl, seems shaken but also might be hiding something—along with her group of friends who call themselves witches.

When more students are found dead, each body arranged like a tarot card, Lola realizes she is trapped in a web of power and ambition that spans centuries. Soon the lines between past and present, spiritual and tangible, begin to blur, and the only way to survive is to seek answers from places she never imagined.

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Murder Will Out by Jennifer K. Breedlove

Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award winner Jennifer K. Breedlove brings coastal Maine to life in Murder Will Out, a lighter, modern gothic mystery that’s as atmospheric as it is heart-warming.

Come for the memories. Stay for the murder…

Little North Island, off the coast of Maine, is so beautiful it could be a postcard. Organist Willow Stone cherishes her memories of childhood summers spent on the island with her godmother Sue… even though her visits ended abruptly, and she hasn’t seen or heard from her godmother in over fifteen years. Until a letter from Sue—and word of Sue’s death—brings Willow back to the picturesque island.

The islanders rarely mention Sue without also bringing up Cameron House, and the controversy around Sue’s unexpected inheritance of the sprawling mansion. When Willow overhears someone threatening the next heir to the property, she starts to question whether Sue’s death was really an accident, and can’t help but wonder whether someone on this sleepy island is willing to stop at nothing—even murder—to claim Cameron House for their own.

Through Willow’s eyes, as well as those of others on the island, a mystery unfolds that keeps drawing Willow back to Cameron House and the very real ghosts that walk its corridors.

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You Did Nothing Wrong by C.G. Drews

A relentless, horror-inducing psychological suspense for fans of The Push and Baby Teeth by New York Times bestselling author CG Drews.

Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts golden-retriever devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.

Then Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it–something strange is going on. The question is, is it with the house, or with her son?

Then the one secret Elodie has been hiding is revealed, and no one is safe anymore.

A pulse-pounding, clever take on the haunted house novel, You Did Nothing Wrong examines the complexities of motherhood and the twisted bonds of family as it races to its shocking ending.

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