The Best Mystery and Thriller Books of 2024

A relentless cat-and-mouse thriller, Ashley Elston’s First Lie Wins follows a protagonist without an identity—or, at least, without one that exists anymore. “Evie Porter” is a pseudonym, and a con artist, and Ryan Sumner of Louisiana is her latest mark. But as her attraction to Ryan grows and her commitment to the con slips, her employer—the mysterious “Mr. Smith”—dangles the keys to Evie’s old, real identity, and sends it out to track her down. This is a classic twist-stuffed suspense for fans who plan to read late into the night.

Here, a real treat for true-crime devotees who relish a puzzle. In The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, Janice Hallett presents the audience with a task: Read the collection of transcriptions, texts, WhatsApp messages, emails, articles, and novel and screenplay excerpts that follow, and either take them to the police or ignore the package altogether. And so we enter the story of true-crime writer Amanda Bailey as she explores the Alperton Angels cult, including the teenage mother who escaped, and the baby—now 18 years old—that the cult members once deemed the Anti-Christ. Set aside time for this one; you’ll want to study it with the conviction of a subreddit.

Screenwriter and author Attica Locke concludes her evocative Highway 59 trilogy with Guide Me Home, in which Texas Ranger Darren Mathews turns in his badge only to be swept into a new mystery when his estranged mother shows up unannounced. She has an investigation for him: A Black college student has supposedly gone missing from the sorority house where she works. Darren doesn’t trust his mother or her motivations, but he soon realizes he’ll have to depend on her if he wants to discover (and understand) the truth. This is yet another politically resonant, beautifully written detective mystery from the talented Locke.

As featured in ELLE’s best books of summer 2024: “Teenager Barbara Van Laar has disappeared from her bed at camp. It’s August 1975, and Barbara’s vanishing feels like an ill-conceived joke: She’s now the second Van Laar sibling who’s gone missing in 15 years. In Liz Moore’s transfixing The God of the Woods, the search for Barbara becomes a gripping nonlinear, dual-timeline tale of class and crime in the Adirondacks.”

If you relish a good piece of publishing gossip, then you’re probably already aware of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s industry-skewing psychological thriller The Plot, which landed in 2021 to great fanfare. In another winking meta-critique from Korelitz, she’s followed up in 2024 with The Sequel, which picks up with the widow of The Plot’s protagonist as her own literary success comes under sudden threat. Clever, cutting, and unafraid, The Sequel recreates the strengths of its predecessor while inventing fresh ways to lure readers through its twists and turns.

As featured in ELLE editors’s favorite books of 2024: Associate editor Adrienne Gaffney writes, “I love, love, love Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series and was devastated to learn he was taking a pause to allow his senior citizen stars a minute to recover from solving four murders in four years. But I’m happy to say We Solve Murders is a worthy follow-up. Part of a whole new series, this story features a security guard and her retired police-officer father-in-law as protagonists, and together they’re just as endearing and funny as the Thursday group.”

Horror meets thriller in this pulse-pounding locked-room suspense, playing off the dread (and claustrophobia) of being trapped in your home with an intruder. In Tracy Sierra’s Nightwatching, a blizzard blows through town, leaving a mother with few options when she spots a shadowy figure standing in her hallway. Hiding with her children in a secret room in the aging house, she listens as the intruder attempts to lure them out of their hiding spot—only for her to realize she recognizes him. Sierra manages to integrate complex ideas about perception, trauma, guilt, and women’s autonomy…without once loosening her grip on the reader’s nerves.

When a missing girl named Ellie Black shows up in the Washington woods two years after her abduction, Detective Chelsey Calhoun knows it will be a sensitive case for her to handle: Her own sister disappeared years ago. But Ellie seems incapable of—or unwilling to—give Chelsey the answers she needs, and Chelsey is determined not to lose another young woman on her watch. As Chelsey digs deeper into Ellie’s case, she must confront truths about her own past and relationships. This dark character-driven drama has a lot to say not only about missing girls, but about the “unremarkable men with beautiful smiles and even bigger promises” who prey on them.

One of the biggest and most beloved suspense novels of the year, All the Colors of the Dark is indeed a rewarding literary saga of missing children, lifelong obsession, evolving friendship, and the elusive nature of justice. As a child in small-town Missouri, protagonist Joseph “Patch” Macauley makes a choice that will change the trajectory of his life (and the lives of those around him) forever: He saves a girl in the woods from abduction. When he’s kidnapped in her stead, he meets another trapped girl, one who will continue to haunt him long after he’s escaped their captor. In the ensuing decades, Patch grows increasingly determined to find this girl, dead or alive. Through multiple multifaceted characters’ perspectives and hundreds of short chapters, Whitaker immerses us in his slow-building but ultimately heart-wrenching quest.

A wry whodunnit with a hilariously unexpected protagonist, Pony Confidential sees Christina Lynch’s horse protagonist, Pony, on a mission to clear the name of his beloved one-time owner, Penny. When Penny is wrongfully accused of murder, Pony decides he is the best detective for the case: As an animal, he has an acute understanding of humanity’s unkindness. Told in the dual perspectives of Pony and Penny, this is a comic mystery that’s lighthearted but not lacking in thematic substance (or twists).

Darkly witty and vivacious, Amy Tintera takes wicked pleasure in coaxing readers through Listen For the Lie, which aims its arrow at the true-crime podcast phenomenon. Her entry to this world of grisly voyeurism is protagonist Lucy, who was once discovered wandering her Texas hometown drenched in her best friend’s blood. In the years since, Lucy has done her darnedest to ignore that night’s gruesome murder—she can’t seem to remember it anyway—but the interest of hit podcast “Listen for the Lie” promises she’ll be pulled back into its mysteries. And what if she’s the one who murdered Savvy? Does it matter, if that’s what everyone wants to believe anyway? Is “Listen for the Lie” after the truth, or the most entertaining story?

An unorthodox tale for the true-crime obsessed, Rabbit Hole is less a conventional suspense and more a case study in mourning and obsession, refracted through the lens of a woman processing her father’s suicide and her sister’s disappearance. With a particular ire for (and understanding of) internet forums, Kate Brody takes readers through protagonist Teddy’s descent into the Reddit community devoted to her sister’s cold case—and one amateur detective whom Teddy can’t seem to resist.

California Bear is a multiple-perspective crime novel about four unexpected collaborators working to unravel an infamous California cold case. This quartet—a hard-drinking former cop, the ex-con he released from prison, the ex-con’s teenage daughter, and a genealogist—ground Duane Swierczynski’s suspense in well-crafted relationships, making their ultimate mission (to catch a serial killer) not only hair-raising but emotionally resonant.

The title of Dervla McTiernan’s novel asks what became of a central character, but readers will soon learn the details of the titular Nina’s disappearance are of less focus than the fallout. When young lovers Simon and Nina head out to Simon’s family cabin in Vermont, everyone’s alarmed when only Simon returns from the trip. Simon’s parents are certain he’s innocent, but Nina’s parents will stop at nothing to find their daughter. Well-paced with a keen eye for those whom society chooses to protect (and why), What Happened to Nina? is a sensitive but powerful suspense.

Every time I begin to fret that the spy genre has reached critical mass, a brilliant soul like Lea Carpenter comes along and reinvigorates the form with zeal and inspiration. Ilium, Carpenter’s latest, is just such a work: The story concerns an unnamed female narrator who marries a much older man named Marcus, who turns out not to be the businessman she’d believed him to be. From the moment he first saw her walking the streets of London, he’s been recruiting her for an espionage role in “Operation Ilium.” Her mission is to pose as an art critic visiting the French estate of a prominent Russian oligarch named Edouard, and aid in the ultimate plot to assassinate him. But after our protagonist endures an unexpected loss, she grows closer to Edouard’s family, and to Edouard himself, finding her morals and allegiances irrevocably tangled.

A visceral, violent crime noir—the book opens with the 15-year-old protagonist cleaning up her father’s latest gunshot wound—My Favorite Scar never shies away from blood, literal or figurative. Translated from Spanish by Mallory Craig-Kuhn, Nicolás Ferraro’s book follows father-daughter pair Víctor and Ámbar, who launch a cross-country revenge ride through Argentina on the hunt for a mercenary. But while the high-octane adventure will certainly entice action fans, it’s Ámbar’s conflicted coming-of-age tale that pierces deepest.

This is far from a traditional thriller. In fact, Dead in Long Beach, California, actively butts up against genre conventions, in spite of its thriller-invoking title and premise: A woman discovers her brother has died by suicide, and she begins impersonating him, answering his texts as if he were still alive. As our protagonist spirals further into grief—and continues posing as her brother—the fictional world of her hit science-fiction series begins to haunt her reality, further threatening both her sanity and her relationships. A true genre-bender that blends meditations on grief with sci-fi snippets, this not-quite thriller is nevertheless its own experimental mystery: Who do we become when we refuse to let the dead rest?

An eerie slow-burn mystery-thriller, L.S. Stratton’s Do What Godmother Says sees writer Shanice Pierce discover, amongst her grandmother’s belongings, a painting by a Harlem Renaissance artist named Estelle Johnson. Shanice soon receives a dramatic offer to sell the artwork, but after she turns it down, strange and terrible things start to happen around her. When people wind up dead, Shanice spirals into a decades-spanning mystery that all points back to the painting itself—and to the patron “Godmother” who was found murdered back in the 1920s.

This delicious follow-up to Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is perfect for mystery fans whose tastes lean more “cozy” than “frightening”—even if the subject itself remains murder. Australian author Ernest Cunningham boards the Ghan, a train taking a four-day trip from Darwin to Adelaide, as a guest of the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society … only for one of the passengers to end up dead. Ernest and his fellow authors become immediate suspects, as well as amateur detectives, in this trope-targeting take on Murder on the Orient Express.

Sagit Schwart’s thriller is a nuanced roller-coaster—high-stakes, high-energy, but with a sensitive approach to its subject matter. Protagonist Beatrice “Beans” Bennett lost her mother when she was only 15. Now decades older, she’s a clinical psychologist, one who uses her own experiences in eating-disorder recovery to better care for her patients. But when her latest patient informs Beans her mother is very much still alive—oh, and wrapped up in a Big Pharma scandal—Beans must reconcile her own mental health with her mother’s secret history. Told via dual timelines between Los Angeles and New York, this debut is a captivating feat.