I Read Over 45 Thrillers This Year—These Are the Ones I Gave Five Stars

Early morning, August 1975: A camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: She’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found. As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets.

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. She devises an escape plan, one that relies on her young son’s bravery and a lot of luck. Room is a celebration of the limitless bond between parent and child, and what it means to journey from one world to another.

Stacy Willingham writes twists into the final pages of her novels like nobody else. One year ago, Isabelle Drake’s life changed forever: her toddler son, Mason, was taken out of his crib in the middle of the night while she and her husband were asleep in the next room. With little evidence and few leads for the police to chase, the case quickly went cold. However, Isabelle cannot rest until Mason is returned to her—literally. The caveat? She hasn’t slept in a year, which makes it even harder to figure out who she can trust… including herself.

After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it triggers memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now.

For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined. Even as others were drawn into their mother’s web, the sisters found the strength and courage to escape an escalating nightmare that culminated in multiple murders.

If you love lots of unexpected twists, Look Closer by David Ellis is for you. Simon and Vicky couldn’t seem more normal: a wealthy Chicago couple, he a respected law professor, she an advocate for domestic violence victims. A stable, if unexciting marriage. But one thing’s for sure…absolutely nothing is what it seems. The pair are far from normal, and one of them just may be a killer. When the body of a beautiful socialite is found hanging in a mansion in a nearby suburb, Simon and Vicky’s secrets begin to unravel. And while both Vicky and Simon are liars, just who exactly is conning who?

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City—quality time with their son and daughter in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and they have come in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Is the holiday home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?

When her restaurant fails, and she falls deeper into debt, Lee Gulliver leaves her old life behind with nothing but her clothes and her Toyota Corolla. Early one morning, she sees a sobbing woman throw herself into the ocean. Lee hauls the woman back to the surface, but instead of appreciation, she is met with fury. The drowning woman, Hazel, tells her that she wanted to die.

Out of options, Hazel retreats, and Lee thinks she’s seen the last of her until her unexpected return the next morning. The women soon strike up a close and unlikely friendship. One day, Hazel wants Lee to help her disappear. Lee soon learns that nothing is as it seems, and that Hazel may not be the friend Lee thought she was.

On a night of promise, excitement, and desire, Pamela Schumacher, president of her sorority, makes the unpopular decision to stay home—a decision that saves her life. Startled awake at 3 a.m. by a strange sound, she finds two of her sisters dead; two others, maimed.

On the other side of the country, a chance encounter brings Ruth Wachowsky into Tina Cannon’s life, and the two form an instant connection. When Ruth goes missing in broad daylight, Tina devotes herself to finding out what happened to her. Determined to make the killer answer for what he did to Ruth, she travels to Florida on a collision course with Pamela.

Celebrating her 45th birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, when Josie shares she has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has wiggled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.

Lex Gracie doesn’t want to think about growing up in her parents’ House of Horrors. And she doesn’t want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It’s been easy enough to avoid her parents—her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can’t run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings, and with the childhood they shared.

Dr. Sheila Tao is a professor of psychology. She knows the three-month fling with her teaching assistant, Ethan Wolfe, has to end. After all, she’s finally engaged to an investment banker who adores her. But when she attempts to end the affair, Ethan Wolfe won’t let her walk away.

Ethan has plans to make her pay for rejecting him. And as she attempts to counter his every threatening move, a crime rocks campus: a female student is found stabbed to death. Someone is raising the stakes of violence, sex, and blackmail…and before she knows it, Sheila is caught in a terrifying game with the lover she couldn’t resist—who is now the monster who won’t let her go.

When Chloe Davis was 12, six teenage girls went missing in her small Louisiana town. By the end of the summer, her own father had confessed to the crimes and was put away for life, leaving Chloe and the rest of her family to grapple with the truth and try to move forward. Now, 20 years later, when a local teenage girl goes missing, and then another, that terrifying summer comes crashing back, with Chloe at the center of the mystery. She can’t tell if she’s paranoid, seeing things, or if she might be about to unmask a killer for the second time in her life. As a psychologist for troubled teens, Chloe must balance her stressful job with a continually unfolding mystery.

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter—she doesn’t behave like most children do. Blythe’s husband, Fox, is convinced that she’s seeing things, but Blythe continues to feel like something is off. In the midst of the unsettling plotline, this story takes a deep dive into motherhood and what happens when it isn’t what you expect it to be. Fans of Verity and Rosemary’s Baby will love this book.

On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until the picture-perfect hostess explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. What happens next, as each of these women grapple with what led to that terrible night? Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake, where their closest neighbors are two miles away in either direction. One day, Wen is playing outside when a stranger abruptly appears, and after talking for a while, tells Wen: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.” Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival. Wen’s family’s fate and the fate of the world become clearly intertwined as the book continues.

True crime writer Wylie Lark doesn’t mind being snowed in at the isolated farmhouse where she’s retreated to write her new book. A cozy fire, complete silence. It would be perfect, if not for the fact that decades earlier, at this very house, two people were murdered in cold blood and a girl disappeared without a trace. When Wylie finds a child in the snow outside and takes them in, things get a whole lot weirder. Soon it becomes clear that the farmhouse isn’t as isolated as Wylie thought, and someone is willing to do anything to find them.

Ever since her true-crime podcast became an overnight sensation and set an innocent man free, Rachel Krall has become a household name. She’s used to being recognized for her voice, but not her face, which is why it’s immediately concerning to her when she finds a note on her windshield begging for help. The new season of her podcast has led her to a small town that has been torn apart by a rape trial—but the mysterious letters keep coming, even there. The past and present start to collide as Rachel uncovers startling connections between past and present cases, fundamentally changing her life and the course of the trial.