What are the best thrillers of 2025? The results of the 2025 BestThrillers.com Book Awards are in, and we’re delighted to list the best books of the year across 15 genres:
- Action Thriller
- Crime Thriller
- Conspiracy Thriller
- Detectives & Sleuths
- Domestic Thriller
- Fantasy & Sci-Fi
- Historical Thriller
- Horror & Supernatural
- Legal Thriller
- Medical Thriller
- Military Thriller
- Mystery
- Political Thriller
- Psychological Thriller
- Spy Thriller
Each year, BestThrillers.com celebrates the most exciting new books in the mystery and thriller landscape. This year, Avanti Centrae’s The Picasso Job takes top honors, delivering a globe-spanning adventure that blends art-world intrigue, emotional stakes and relentless danger. Elsewhere, readers hungry for layered, genre-bending fiction that holds up a mirror to our world will find plenty to savor. Debut novelist Alexandra Pugachevsky’s I, Rodion is a provocative psychological thriller that will force you to question your ideas about selfhood and free will.
Fans of historical suspense will be captivated by Paul Levine’s Midnight Burning, which injects Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin into the charged facist underground of pre–World War II Los Angeles. Veteran screenwriter and novelist Rich Leder’s Extraterrestrial Noir delivers a genre-bending fusion of sci-fi, comic mystery and dark humor, while former federal agent Jaime Forza’s The Rules of Kongo follows a DEA agent who finds himself entangled in a dangerous operation alongside an enigmatic witch doctor.
See all the winners in the list below.
2025 was an incredible year for mystery and thriller fans, and these 16 standout novels deliver the goods. Following our list of the year’s category winners, take a deep dive into our list of 60 incredible finalists.
2025 BOOK OF THE YEAR
The Picasso Job by Avanti Centrae
The Picasso Job earns its BestThrillers.com Book of the Year crown by doing what few thrillers dare: delivering relentless momentum without sacrificing emotional heft.
Dakota “No-flak Dak” Black once dreamed of the FBI. Instead, he’s locked in Folsom for a murder he insists he didn’t commit.
When master Iranian art thief Bijan “Renoir” Reza sparks a wildfire-shrouded escape, Dakota seizes his only shot at freedom, only to be hunted by Cody Winters, the brother of the man he supposedly killed.
Forced into an uneasy alliance, the fugitives race to recover a stolen Picasso worth five million dollars, each driven by betrayal, desperation, and a murky sense of justice.
Standing against them is FBI agent Elizabeth Everett, the woman who originally caught Reza.
Fueled by grief and duty, Everett adds both moral gravity and narrative torque as the chase crosses cultural fault lines and geopolitical stakes.
The novel’s thematic backbone asks who deserves redemption, who merely grabs it, and what a masterpiece can symbolize about human light and darkness.
Picasso isn’t just loot. It’s a mirror reflecting creation, corruption, and the choices that define us.
BEST ACTION THRILLER
Messenger for the Dead by Matthew Fults
In former Army Ranger–turned–investigative journalist Mathieu James, Fults has found the intellectual action hero that is endearing him to the same fans who love Daniel Silva and Terry Hayes.
As intelligence teams in Oslo prepare for a high-risk raid that could expose or eliminate terror mastermind Aadan Mukhtaar, parallel threads across Washington, London, and Europe tighten the noose.
CIA analyst Alyssa Stevens and MI6 liaison Conan MacGregor react in real time to a threat that crosses borders as fast as the narrative itself.
For James, who lost his parents to related attacks, the mission is achingly personal, yet Fults never lets emotion outweigh momentum. Instead, it fuels it.
The fact that James struggles to understand where journalism ends and hunting begins only makes the book more appealing.
Through it all, Fults never lets emotion outweight momentum.
Layered atop the chase is a chilling geopolitical dimension.
The result is a thriller that delivers not only action, but consequence, scale, and a resounding sense of “this could happen.”
BEST CONSPIRACY THRILLER
Vatican Daughter by Joni Marie Iraci
Joni Marie Iraci’s Vatican Daughter opens with a shockwave: moments before greeting the world, newly elected Pope Joseph Morris confesses to Cardinal Roselli that he has impregnated a young journalist.
The child is due any day.
It’s an audacious setup that instantly signals why this novel stands out in a crowded field of Vatican conspiracy thrillers.
Iraci distinguishes herself by delivering a structural gambit, revealing the fate of the pope, the child, and Roselli early, placing readers ahead of the mother herself. This heightened dramatic irony transforms every discovery into a ticking time bomb.
The novel echoes the real-life stories of children seized under papal authority, especially during the era of Pope Pius IX.
Is papal power rewriting lives across eras?
The resulting thematic tension between love, truth, and institutional might gives the thriller its emotional voltage.
Vatican Daughter succeeds not just as a conspiracy thriller, but as a story with lasting moral and emotional reverberations.
BEST CRIME THRILLER
The Body Brokers by Brian Cuban
Disgraced attorney Jason Feldman’s life collapses the moment his girlfriend dies from a fentanyl overdose.
Unwilling to accept the official story, he descends into a world where human life is expendable and the truth is far more devastating than anyone wants revealed.
When police dismiss Emily’s death as an accident, Jason joins forces with her wary but determined roommate, Delaney, to uncover what really happened.
Their unofficial investigation exposes a lethal secret that threatens not only their own safety but the safety of everyone around them.
The search leads them deep inside corrupt addiction treatment centers willing to silence anyone who gets too close to the truth.
Cuban doesn’t blow us away with an especially spectacular premise. Instead, the book succeeds because Jason himself feels absolutely real.
From every minor struggle to occasional sparks of hope, the arc is absolutely tangible.
Cuban lends Jason a moral weight that amplifies every twist, and even the most jaded of readers will root for him.
The recovery arc and the investigative procedural are equally heartbreaking and inspiring, fueling first-class suspense.
DETECTIVES AND SLEUTHS
The Amalfi Secret by Dean Reineking and Catherine Reineking
Starting with the book’s premise, which avoids the usual cliche of a quick shock scene and assures a hero’s survival, The Amalfi Secret is unlike any other thriller you’ve read.
Dean and Catherine Reineking fuse political intrigue, espionage, historical riddles and spiritual themes into a thriller that feels both cinematic and intellectually sharp.
The settings, from the Amalfi Coast to Rome, heighten the tension while grounding the story in rich cultural atmosphere.
Even as the conspiracy expands, the narrative never loses sight of the protagonist’s emotional journey.
The plot intersects with Catholic prophecy, particularly the messages attributed to Father Stefano Gobbi.
Although not formally recognized by the Church, these warnings about spiritual conflict and global upheaval add a compelling religious undercurrent.
The book ultimately delivers more than a finely crafted investigation.
It elevates the genre through intelligent plotting, atmospheric settings, and a detective protagonist whose search for truth resonates on both personal and global levels.
BEST DOMESTIC THRILLER
GRQ by Steven Bernstein
Steven Bernstein shapes this domestic pressure cooker through crisp, addictive chapters that move between self defense and raw confession.
The book opens in Los Angeles as a smooth talking financial advisor who insists on his own reliability introduces us to his client Marlon, an idea man drowning in debt after buying a home far beyond his means.
While foreclosure notices pile up, a buried family tragedy gradually rises to the surface.
Marlon’s excuses are both absurd and heartbreaking.
He chases one get rich quick promise after another, convinced that the next scheme will save his family.
Meanwhile Viola, his exhausted and grieving wife, clings to old voicemails from a lost child.
Their daughter Sarah tries to support her father even as her husband Michael warns that Marlon is both liar and opportunist. Viola’s father sees only failure in his son in law, while Marlon’s mother, kind yet gullible, keeps writing checks he cannot repay.
The book captured our hearts with its rare blend of humor, dread and emotional truth, as well as its startlingly fresh take on the collapse and resilience of an American family.
BEST FANTASY & SCI-FI NOVEL
Extraterrestrial Noir by Rich Leder
Are aliens visiting Earth because they want sex and money?
Veteran screenwriter and novelist Rich Leder’s wildly entertaining novel begins on the night of a predicted meteor shower in suburban New Jersey, where the Devine family gathers in their front yard before dawn, hoping for a light show.
Instead, a rectangular object drops from the sky and smashes straight into their house.
Moments earlier, their basement had been a cozy family hangout devoted to classic film noir with icons like Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
After the crash, the Devines come face to face with a silver, geometric alien that promptly shape-shifts into those very stars, turning the family’s favorite genre into its personal manipulation toolkit.
The book succeeds because of Leder’s ingenious detailing of life on Hope Circle, a cul-de-sac filled with intertwined histories.
Leder manages to capture the offbeat teenage heroics of Stranger Things, the community dynamics of Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane and the frank intimacy of Sex and the City.
It’s a glorious alien invasion like you’ve never seen before.
BEST HISTORICAL THRILLER
Midnight Burning by Paul Levine
Midnight Burning fuses authentic history with exhilarating storytelling. Its seamless mix of fact and fiction feels both inventive and uncannily real, creating a narrative that surprises even as it rings true.
The result is a bold, original thriller about a slice of American history that has largely been forgotten.
Levine plunges readers into 1937, a moment when America stands at a crossroads as war looms in Europe and fascist movements gain traction at home.
The story follows the unlikely but inspired pairing of Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin, real-life friends who stumble onto a plot by American Nazi sympathizers to assassinate major Hollywood figures and ignite a violent uprising.
With the FBI distracted by its pursuit of suspected communists, the two icons take matters into their own hands.
They are joined by Georgia Ann Robinson, the LAPD’s first Black female officer, whose resolve and bravery anchor the mission.
Their investigation leads to a clandestine encampment in the San Gabriel Mountains, where a heavily armed militia prepares for a catastrophic strike.
What follows is a tense pursuit filled with sharp banter, razor edged wit and a final confrontation that tests every ounce of their intellect and courage.
HORROR & SUPERNATURAL
The Rules of Kongo by Jaime Forza
The Rules of Kongo earns this year’s Best Horror and Supernatural Novel Award because, in the tradition of The Silence of the Lambs, it delivers a rare fusion of hard-edged crime fiction and deeply unsettling terror. On plot alone, it stands as a fully absorbing law enforcement procedural, yet its psychological descent into black magic transforms it into something far more disturbing. By the final chapters, the boundary between grounded realism and supernatural menace becomes so porous that the story feels far more frightening than anything Clive Barker ever conjured.
Author Jaime Forza, himself a former federal agent, focuses the story on a newly minted as a DEA Special Agent who steps into the role hungry to prove himself in the escalating drug war.
What begins as a straightforward assignment quickly mutates into something far darker.
DeSano is thrust into an uneasy partnership with a mysterious witch doctor who has traded allegiance for the chance to inform. Their mission zeroes in on the hidden link between a brutal criminal syndicate and a black magic cult whose rituals are both bloody and strategic. These rites shield the cartel’s operations and exert a terrifying psychological force that pulls DeSano toward the edge of madness.
The deeper he ventures, the more horrifying the revelations become. DeSano is forced to confront powers that defy logic, secrets that corrode his sense of justice, and the darkest urges of human nature. Every discovery blurs moral boundaries and tightens the grip of the occult until reality itself begins to feel unreliable.
BEST LEGAL THRILLER
The Edge of Guilt by David Miraldi
Attorney Christopher Miraldi, drawing on more than four decades in civil law, delivers a taut, true-events–inspired story about a family seeking accountability after a teenager’s suicide.
The Edge of Guilt combines procedural accuracy, emotional depth and a rare willingness to portray the legal community’s ethical failures with stark realism.
Hidden motives, shifting loyalties and the uneasy boundary between justice and institutional self-preservation are laid bare.
The book’s core characters are all emotionally charged.
Attorney Paul Schofield, whose shaky practice pushes him toward a case that grows more dangerous the deeper he digs.
His wife, Wendy, whose involvement becomes unexpectedly crucial.
Dennis, whose grief masks volatility and mixed motives, and Cindy, crushed by guilt for approving the treatment that preceded Heather’s death.
While the entire book is absorbing, legal thrillers are typically so procedural that they fail often to surprise.
That’s not the case with this outstanding novel, as the late-breaking, hard-hitting chapters deliver actual shock and awe.
BEST MEDICAL THRILLER
The Regression Strain by Kevin Hwang
Kevin Hwang, a widely published professor of internal medicine, delivers a standout work of medical suspense in The Regression Strain, this year’s Best Medical Thriller.
The novel opens as Dr. Peter Palma joining the medical staff of a transatlantic cruise, expecting the usual mix of minor ailments and vacation mishaps.
Instead, a baffling illness emerges and turns the ship into a floating nightmare.
Hwang uses the confined setting to examine how fragile social order becomes when people are cut off from help and forced to confront an invisible threat.
The story explores the erosion of trust, the tension between scientific reasoning and instinctive survival responses, and the ways in which fear rewrites moral boundaries.
The ship functions as a pressure chamber in which civility thins, authority falters, and group behavior shifts in unpredictable ways.
The book’s pacing is deliberate yet relentless, the scientific detail grounded without overwhelming the narrative, and the psychological observations insightful and moving.
The novel is less about individual heroics and more about the human organism under stress.
The result is a gripping, intelligent outbreak thriller.
BEST MILITARY THRILLER
Arctic Red by James Bultema
Arctic Red deftly traces the long arc of a geopolitical spark first lit beneath the ice in 2007, when a symbolic Russian claim on the polar seabed plants the seeds of future conflict.
The novel frames this historic moment not as spectacle but as the quiet opening move in a decades long contest for dominance in the world’s last unclaimed frontier.
Author James Bultema shifts to a near future in which Russia’s ambition resurfaces through covert militarization, concealed missile deployments, and a strategy built on exploiting isolation and ambiguity.
Opposing nations confront a crisis shaped by deterrence theory, contested sovereignty, and the fragile balance between surveillance and secrecy.
In other words, just a little light reading. And exactly what military thriller fans love.
Bultema uses the Arctic itself as a thematic engine, treating the region’s extreme environment as both tactical constraint and metaphor for the brittle state of global stability.
Above the ice, Bultema widens the lens to examine integrated air and space operations, information dominance, and the precision required to coordinate layered defenses in a landscape that punishes every miscalculation. Bultema crafts a study of restraint, brinkmanship, and the dangerous elasticity of peace.
BEST MYSTERY NOVEL
Justice for Emerson by Karen E. Osborne
Karen E. Osborne’s Justice for Emerson opens at a community nonprofit north of New York City, as CEO Aria descends into the basement in search of elderly volunteer Emerson.
Instead, she finds him stabbed and shot.
It’s a lean, high-stakes premise that introduces the central players at exactly the right temperature: a principled but cornered leader, a vulnerable volunteer with secrets of his own, and a crime scene that refuses to stay tidy.
What elevates the novel is how Osborne builds her mystery. In the wrong hands, shifting timelines and locales can be annoying and distracting.
But Osborne effectively engineers a layered, time-hopping structure that threads the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 2020s into a single tightening investigation.
Moving between New York, Vietnam, Thailand and other locales, Osborne employs atmosphere as evidence. Each setting becomes a sensory clue, each era a piece of the case’s concealed architecture.
Thematically, Justice for Emerson reaches far beyond the whodunit. The book succeeds not just as a murder mystery but as a deeply human investigation into the nature of justice itself.
Osborne’s deft world-building, emotional acuity and cross-generational storytelling make the novel a standout.
BEST POLITICAL THRILLER
Fortunate Son by Andrew Bridgeman
In Andrew Bridgeman’s first Emma Noble book, a man named Ben Danvers, who was kidnapped two decades earlier and long presumed dead, is found alive five days before the presidential inauguration.
His biological mother is about to become Vice President.
Rookie FBI agent Emma Noble is assigned to deliver the news to Ben, but she soon realizes that his reappearance is no coincidence.
For years, a hidden mastermind has been quietly positioning pawns throughout the American government, and inauguration day is the culmination of his plan.
With every revelation, Emma understands that she is not pursuing a typical extremist.
She’s facing a strategist whose reach is far deeper than anyone imagined, and the countdown to catastrophe has already begun.
Trust becomes the most dangerous risk of all.
Needless to say, the stakes are sufficiently high without being outrageously over the top.
Sure, the twisty plot is worth the price of admission alone. But what makes this a standout thriller is Bridgeman’s meticulous examination of identity, legacy and the meaning of family.
BEST PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
I, Rodion by Alexandra Pugachevsky
Author Alexandra Pugachevsky brilliantly leans into contemporary AI fears and transforms them into a story that is not only wildly entertaining, but also believable.
I, Rodion succeeds in part because of how well Pugachevsky defined and developed the book’s primary voice.
More importantly, it captures the anxiety of a world where our identities can be copied, manipulated, and ultimately used against us.
The book relays the haunting journey of eighteen year old Rodion Likharev, a Russian immigrant trying to rebuild his life in Pittsburgh.
When he accepts a lucrative position at a secretive AI research lab, he believes he has finally found his way out of hardship.
His assignment appears straightforward: interact with his digital twin, an AI duplicate engineered to mirror him flawlessly.
Yet the job that seems like salvation quickly becomes a psychological descent into uncertainty.
Pugachevsky fuses cutting edge speculation with emotional rawness, crafting a thriller that interrogates consciousness and the limits of free will without sacrificing pace or suspense.
SPY THRILLER
The Torus Run by Harry Buck
The Torus Run interrogates the meaning of trust in a world where your closest advisor might not be human. Can a digital double that knows your secrets truly be loyal, or does its allegiance lie elsewhere?
Set in near-future San Francisco, the story unfolds in a city where the elite stride alongside AI Twins, digital doppelgängers embedded in smart glasses that serve as coaches, confidants, and gatekeepers, even as millions lose their livelihoods. Innovation gleams on the surface while danger presses in from every side.
Against the sharp advice of his caustic Twin, Zero, notorious developer Stash Novak heads out to reconnect with his old Stanford colleague Professor Janet Peck.
Reaching her requires crossing ground controlled by AI Doomers, activists who view the Twin ecosystem as the spark of an impending catastrophe. Stash fears the arrival of a phenomenon he calls the Singularity and hopes to forge a fragile alliance with Peck to prevent it.
It goes without saying that paranoia is at an all-time high, and spies are everywhere.
Author Harry Buck’s ambitious novel is ultimately a spy thriller wrapped within a near-future context (so near, in fact, that it may no longer be considered “science fiction” within he halls of some of America’s biggest tech companies).
Buck delivers high stakes without sacrificing nuance, creating a world that feels both imaginative and frighteningly familiar. The result is a standout achievement in modern thriller writing and one of the most relevant and exhilarating novels of the year.
BOOK AWARD FINALISTS
Sixty sensational finalists were chosen for recognition in our 2025 Book Award series. Finalist book titles are listed in alphabetical order.
A Nose for Death by M.K. Dean
A Snow Leopard Named Midas by S.L. Cook
Admit Nothing by Scott Urbach
Amanita Virosa by Barry Harden
American Renaissance Book 1 by Amory Patrick Blaine
Baking Ice Cubes by Alexi Venice
Black Sun Rising by Otho Eskin
Blame it on the Moon by Lou Pugliese
Countdown by Johan Ottosen
Curse of the Caribbean by Dave McKeon
Danger Inside the Beltway by Terri Greening
Deadly Odds 8.0 by Allen Wyler
Deadly Vision by T.D. Severin
Deceit of the Manna by Henry Cox
Devils in Paradise by A.D. Price
Do Not Resuscitate by Scott Eveloff MD
Don’t Look Down by Matthew Becker
Dragon Island by J.B. Manas
Echoes of Fortune: The Search for Braddock’s Lost Gold by David R. Leng
Fatal Castle by David Boito
Havana Syndrome by Jeffrey James Higgins
HAVOC: Trouble on the Trail by Cam Torrens
Homecoming by Gary Quesenberry
Illusions of Trust by Jeffrey S. Stephens
Karma Never Sleeps by R. John Dingle
Killer Vintage by Eric D. Sanchez
Killing Her Sharply by Katherine Burnette
Mindstock by Richard Yonck
Missing in Tanzania by James Merriman
Mission: Red Scythe by C.W. James
Mrs. Oliver’s Twist by Saralyn Richard
Neural Bounty: A Space Western Noir Thriller by Daniel P Douglas
Night Plague by Alex Lettau
Nightmare Before Mardi Gras: 14 Days of Madness, Mayhem and Murder by Robert Hecker
No Hill To Die On by Martin Roy Hill
On Predation Road by Michael Allan Scott
One More Chance by Reno R. Mist
Project Virtus by C.W. Lemoine
Reservations by Theresa Janson
Rule One by Michael Lucker
Savage Malice by Kit Karson
Smoke and Secrets by A.J. McCarthy
Someone Had To Die by Jack Luellen
Streets of Nashville by Michael Amos Cody
The Bystander by John David
The Decision by Joe Salerno
The Fisherman Returns by JT Owens
The Lucky Six by Gordon Cooper
The Medici Curse by Daco Auffenorde
The Monuments Must Bleed by Clifton Wilcox
The Paroxysm Deception by Jastrow Hill
The Sins We Inherit: A Mafia Legacy in Blood by Carlo J. Emanuele
The Snake Handler’s Wife by Sue Hinkin
The Third Estate by D.R. Berlin
Operation Nightfall: The Web of Spies by Karl Wegener
Toxic Minds by Anthony Lee
Treasure Coast by James Foley
Tye by J. Denison Reed and Elliot J. Emerson
Vanishing Act by Jerry Jamison
Whatever It Takes by Alan Brenham