Thrillers Brimming With Mystery and Horror
Everyone knows that fall is horror season. Not that you ever need an excuse to read more thrillers, mysteries, and horror novels of all kinds, but there’s something especially satisfying about spooky reads during Halloween season. If you’re a fan of the mystery thriller genre and you’re looking for something fresh to read this fall, this list of books is going to explode your TBR. Maybe you’re tired of the same old horror tropes. Maybe you’re looking for thrillers with characters who share your experiences, or characters whose lives are different from yours. Whatever kind of spooky reads you’re craving, this list has got something for everyone, from dark domestic thrillers to vampire plagues.
I’ve been watched all my life. I’m used to being stared at. Observed. Followed.
Washed up teen star Liv Hendricks quit acting after her beloved younger sister inexplicably disappeared following a Hollywood party gone wrong. Liv barely escaped with her life, and her sister was never heard from again. But all this time, someone’s been waiting patiently to finish what was started…
Now fifteen years later, broke and desperate, Liv is forced to return to the spotlight. She crowdfunds a webseries in which she’ll pose as a real-life private detective–a nod to the show she starred on as a teen. When a mysterious donor challenges her to investigate a series of disappearances outside a town made famous by the horror movies filmed there, Liv has no choice but to accept.
Liv is given a cryptic first clue: Follow the white wolf. And now a darker game is about to begin. Through social media, someone is leaving breadcrumbs to follow. As Liv makes increasingly disturbing discoveries, her show explodes in popularity. A rapt internet audience is eager to watch it all–perhaps even at the cost of Liv’s own life…
Nora Watts has built a life for herself, and revisiting her past isn't part of it. But then she gets a frantic phone call one night from the parents of the baby she gave up for adoption years before. That baby is a teenager now, and she's missing. Nora can't help but get involved, and she sets out to find the missing girl, a journey that turns into a dangerous deep-dive into her own troubled past.
Romance author Alyssa Cole makes her crime debut with this suspenseful social thriller about the sinister implications of gentrification. Sydney Green has lived her whole life in her beloved Brooklyn neighborhood. In an attempt to counteract the changes she sees around her every day, she starts a walking tour of the neighborhood that focuses on its untold history. But the more she learns about that history, the stranger all those changes seem. And when her neighbors start disappearing under mysterious circumstances, Sydney soon realizes that what's going on is even more dangerous than she thought.
Related: Five Domestic Thrillers To Send Chills Up Your Spine
The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.
A bestseller in Korea, The Hole is a psychological thriller about the horrors of loneliness and isolation. After a car crash that kills his wife leaves him paralyzed, Ogi, unable to move or speak, is left in the care of his mother-in-law. Neglected and isolated, alone in a bed, Ogi has only his thoughts and memories of his wife for company. His only view into the outside world is the holes he watches his mother-in-law digging in the garden. As you get deeper into this eerie and haunting novel, the many layers of Ogi's story begin to unfold, slowly revealing something truly sinister.
This creepy and epic vampire story begins when a dead woman walks out of a morgue in a small town in Arizona. As more dead bodies all over the US begin disappearing form morgues, all afflicted with the same strange disease that solidifies their blood, the truth becomes apparent. Soon the US, and then the world, is overrun with vampires. Successful and charismatic, they infiltrate all aspects of society, and things come to a head when one vampire decides to run for office. This kaleidoscopic history of the vampire uprising, told from multiple perspectives, is a genre-bending tour-de-force.
Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish.
Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered.
Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.
Related: Finding Inspiration in Unlikely Places With Colleen Hoover
Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia’s Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of sixty degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common.
But motorists are not the only victims of the highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it is a massive graveyard for the former Soviet Union’s gulag prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to death and left where their bodies fell, consumed by the frozen elements and plowed beneath the permafrost road.
Fascinated by the history, documentary producer Felix “Teig” Teigland is in Russia to drive the highway, envisioning a new series capturing Life and Death on the Road of Bones with a ride to the town of Akhust, “the coldest place on Earth”, collecting ghost stories and local legends along the way. Only, when Teig and his team reach their destination, they find an abandoned town, save one catatonic nine-year-old girl–and a pack of predatory wolves, faster and smarter than any wild animals should be.
Pursued by the otherworldly beasts, Teig’s companions confront even more uncanny and inexplicable phenomena along the Road of Bones, as if the ghosts of Stalin’s victims were haunting them. It is a harrowing journey that will push Teig beyond endurance and force him to confront the sins of his past.
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