Tim Mason’s The Nightingale Affair features a cover design by Steve Godwin. This novel is a twisty Victorian detective thriller, and this book’s stunning cover really embodies the beauty and the darkness of thriller stories set in this time period. The story follows Inspector Charles Field as he hunts a sinister serial killer who’s targeting Florence Nightingale and her nurses in Crimea and, later, women in London.

Kellye Garrett’s heart-racing suspense thriller Like A Sister was recently released in paperback, and the new release features a beautiful new cover design by Kirin Diemont. Reality TV star Desiree Pierce has been discovered dead on a playground in the Bronx the morning after her 25th birthday party. Everyone assumes Desiree died of an overdose, but Desiree’s estranged half-sister Lena Scott is not so sure. Now Lena is determined to find out what really happened. The paperback image here channels the glamour and mystery of Desiree’s character.

The super fun cover of Margot Douaighy’s Scorched Grace says a lot about the mystery story and its main character, amateur detective Sister Holiday. Sister Holiday is a tattooed, chain-smoking, queer nun who teaches at Saint Sebastian’s School in New Orleans. When someone sets the school on fire, Sister Holiday quickly becomes dissatisfied with the police’s investigation and decides to put her own sleuthing skills to the test.

The cover of Robin Peguero’s With Prejudice is ominous and foreboding, which is just the right mood for this edge-of-your-seat debut thriller. This book follows the story of a jury, seven strangers who would have never met otherwise and who must now come together to make the biggest decision of their lives. How will their biases, beliefs, and personal experiences affect their views on a complicated murder case? Well, that’s something a cover can’t tell you. You’ll have to read to find out.

If we could use one word to describe the cover of Sarah Rose Etter’s novel Ripe, it would be “juicy.” Just have a look at this cover and see for yourself. Ripe is an unsettling and darkly funny story about one millennial woman’s descent into the world of Silicon Valley startups and the late capitalist hellscape. Cassie started off bright-eyed and excited to have what she thought was her dream job, but between the long hours, insufferable coworkers, and unethical work practices, Cassie begins to wonder what she’s gotten herself into and how far she’s willing to go to stay on top in this modern world.

Maria Dong’s Liar, Dreamer, Thief features a cover design and illustration by Shreya Gupta. The cover image alludes to the many sides of the story’s main character Katrina Kim. Katrina is the black sheep of her family. She’s broke, and she’s a little unhinged, and her obsession with her co-worker, Kurt, is verging on stalker territory. When Katrina gets a cryptic message from Kurt, she’s horrified to realize that for every moment she’s been watching him, he’s also been watching her.

Who doesn’t love a thriller cover with flowers? Especially when those flowers are coming out of a person’s head? Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, The Things We Do to Our Friends by Heather Darwent follows the story of Clare, who comes to the city in the hopes of reinventing herself. When Clare meets Tabitha in her art class, she knows they’re meant to be friends. Tabitha’s sophisticated lifestyle is exactly the kind of life Clare has been envisioning for herself. But when Tabitha reveals to Clare a secret project she’s been working on, Clare realizes this friendship might not be the escape she thought it was.

Twenty-four-year-old Bridge is paralyzed by choices: all the other lives she could have lived, the decisions she could have made. And now, who she should be in the wake of her mother’s unexpected death.

Jo was a maverick neuroscientist fixated on an artifact she called the “dreamworm” that she believed could open the doors to other worlds. It was part of Jo’s grand delusion, her sickness, and it cost her everything, including her relationship with her daughter.

But in packing up Jo’s house, Bridge discovers Jo’s obsession hidden amongst her things. And the dreamworm works, exactly the way it’s supposed to, the way Bridge remembers from when she was a little girl. Suddenly Bridge can step into other realities, otherselves. In one of them, could she find out what really happened to her mother? What Bridge doesn’t know is that there are others hunting for the dreamworm—who will kill to get their hands on it. 

Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play The Witch of Edmonton, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the ornate, if crumbling, gothic mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
 
Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house out for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds,  disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift.  All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone . . .

At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life

It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything.

“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead
 
As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.