Psychological Thriller Books

The best psychological thriller book reviews. Psychological thrillers include a wide-ranging list of themes, including crimes committed by mentally disturbed individuals, the often blurry line between reality and fantasy, and a variety of psychologically suspenseful situations.

The Ninth Session, One of the Year’s Best Thrillers

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The Bottom Line: A fast-paced, suffocating psychological thriller featuring a series-worthy heroine. One of the year’s best thrillers. Dr. Alicia Reese’s first encounter with new patient Lucas Ferro begins as she finds him suffering from a crippling panic attack in her darkened office bathroom. Ferro has been in therapy before, and he’s worried that nobody can help him. By their third meeting, he discloses vague […]

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The Institute, a Terrifying New Stephen King Thriller

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The Bottom Line: A psychic thriller that ranks among King’s best. Stephen King’s latest thriller The Institute is in no way a sequel to Dr. Sleep (which itself was a sequel to The Shining), but thematically speaking, it’s a close cousin. As in Dr. Sleep, villains with terrifying psychic powers are hell bent on leveraging the powers of gifted children. In the middle of the

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What You Did, an Engaging Psychological Thriller by Claire McGowan

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The Bottom Line: Big Little Lies meets The Big Chill. A thoroughly engaging whodunnit. Ah, reunions. They are always filled with both anticipation and dread. But in Claire McGowan’s new novel, the 20th anniversary get together of six college friends is also a deadly one. Host Ali finally has the life she always wanted: a career she can be proud of and a wonderful family with

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A Divided Mind, a Terrifying Psychological Thriller by M. Billiter

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The Bottom Line: A haunting psychological thriller that will stick with you long past the final chapter. Wyoming high school senior Branson Kovac hears voices. Sometimes, he sees entities that he calls “the shadow people” carry out violent acts. And sometimes, they kill people. Including his mother. Told in alternating points of view, A Divided Mind is the terrifying story of what happens when a

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To Hell with Johnny Manic, One of the Year’s Best Thrillers

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The Bottom Line: One of the year’s best thrillers. Part psychological suspense, part contemporary noir, Johnny Manic is wonderfully unreliable. Tom Gantry, a.k.a. Johnny Manis, a.k.a. Johnny Manic, is having an identity crisis of epidemic proportions. As Tom tells it, the gregarious, effortlessly cool Johnny Manis became legendary in the tech world for making a fortune off mobile video games, publishing a manifesto, then deleting

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The Bedwetter: Journal of a Budding Psychopath, a Highly Recommended Thriller by Lee Allen Howard

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The Bottom Line: Original, audacious and raw. A truly dark treat for fans of the serial killer genre.  Russell Pisarek, the budding killer at the heart of The Bedwetter, is truly in a class of his own. Should Lee Allen Howard’s The Bedwetter be adapted for TV, the money line in the series trailer will surely be, “I could care less about skinning this cat. That’s kid

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Desperate Paths, a First-Rate Crime Thriller by E.C. Diskin

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The Bottom Line: A masterfully crafted murder mystery that spins a small town’s dark secrets about family, faith and racial tensions into pure gold. Within a week of returning to her hometown to care for her father, struggling actress Brooklyn Anderson finds herself at the epicenter of two brutal crimes. Just hours before her arrival, an unknown assailant shoots A-list actor and Eden native Darius

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Project Purple, a Dystopian Page-Turner by Michael Greco

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The Bottom Line: The Hunger Games meets Survivor. Equal parts dystopian thriller and satire, Project Purple is a truly memorable page-turner. For a tidy sum of cash as well as the promise of bonuses and fame, 13 wildly diverse people agree to recreate a colonial experience as it was in the early 1600s, and have the entirety of their experience broadcast worldwide. The colonists in

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The Broadcast, a Psychological Thriller by Liam Fialkov

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The Bottom Line: The Man in the High Castle meets The Circle. A truly innovative sci-fi thriller that should make for lively book club discussion. What if a technological breakthrough could allow people to view video footage of historical events going back thousands of years? That is the promise of a fascinating technology at the center of The Broadcast, a novel about a television network

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Hometown Boys, a White-Knuckled Thriller by Mary Maddox

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The Bottom Line: Don’t miss this white-knuckled thriller from the dark princess of suspense. After the grisly murder of her aunt and uncle, 40-year-old Kelly Durrell returns to her hometown in rural Illinois. Soon, her grief is compounded by another shock – local authorities have arrested Kelly’s ex-boyfriend, a local junkie named Troy, and accepted his confession. His stated motive? Revenge. Kelly broke his heart

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