Category Archives: Mystery & Thriller

Codebreaker by Jay Martel

Mia Hayes has peaceful plans for the summer—find a part-time job at a coffee shop and work on her application for Harvard. Those plans are shattered one night when government agents arrive unannounced at her home seeking something they believe her father has taken. When the dust settles, her mother is dead and her father is gone, a fugitive on the run. Three weeks later, and still reeling from her father’s betrayal, Mia spends her seventeenth birthday at a protest in the heart of D.C., where she meets Logan, a rebellious and charming hacker. Just as she’s enjoying… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Minor injury depiction, including a concussion & gunshot wounds
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of parents in a car accident recounted
  • Car chase, resulting in a car falling into the river and a fatal drowning
  • Gun violence
  • Physical assault (fistfights)

Pretty Dead Things by Kelsey Cox

2000: Isabelle Whitmore vanishes at Sherman Ranch in Anhalt, Texas, without a trace. 2025: The annual Lone Star Princess Pageant looms, bringing long-standing grudges to the surface. Ingrid fled Anhalt in the wake of her sister Isabelle’s disappearance and has now returned, just in time for a construction crew to start digging up Sherman Ranch; the pageant brings up past traumas that Melanie can’t forget; Cat, newly sober, starts to feel threatened in ways that bring back old demons; and Sarah Lynn, who comes from a long line of pageant winners, knows that losing is… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape of a minor discussed
  • Child abuse & neglect
  • Alcoholism & prescription pill abuse
  • Cancer
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Disappearance & murder of a daughter/sister (theme)
  • Bullying & hazing

Party of Liars by Kelsey Cox

Today is Sophie Matthews’s sixteenth birthday party, an exclusive black-tie bash in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, where secrets are as deep-rooted as the sprawling live oaks. Sophie’s dad has spared no expense, and his renovated cliffside mansion—once thought haunted—is now hosting the event of the season. Then, just before the candles on the three-tiered red velvet cake are blown out, a body falls from the balcony onto the starlit dance floor below. It’s a killer guest list. DANI: Sophie’s new stepmother who’s been plagued by self-doubt ever since… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcoholism & alcohol abuse
  • Post-partum depression
  • Intrusive thoughts

You’re No Better by Andrew Joseph White

Morgan Slaughter, a seventeen-year-old trans boy with autism, put his serial killer father in prison years ago. Despite that, everyone thinks Morgan will grow up to be just like his dad: including his volatile mother, the documentary crew following their family, and maybe himself. Desperately, Morgan latches onto his father’s final victim—the only one who was never identified—hoping that if he unravels the mystery, he’ll finally prove he’s better than the man who hurt him. But this puts Morgan in the crosshairs of classmate Felicity Keating, who knows the truth about Morgan’s… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Transphobia, queerphobia & misgendering and forced closeting (on-page)
  • Rape recounted, sexual harassment, sexual assault & grooming
  • Physical & emotional child abuse (theme)
  • Suicidal ideation & intrusive thoughts
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse, including forced alcohol consumption
  • Hospitalisation (on-page)
  • Graphic murder & torture recounted
  • Kidnapping recounted & confinement (on-page)
  • Blackmail

Base Notes by Lara Elena Donnelly

In New York City everybody needs a side hustle, and perfumer Vic Fowler has developed a delicate art that has proved to be very creating bespoke scents that evoke immersive memories—memories that, for Vic’s clients, are worth killing for. But the city is expensive, and these days even artisanal murder doesn’t pay the bills. When Joseph Eisner, a former client with deep pockets, offers Vic an opportunity to expand the enterprise, the money is too good to turn down. But the job is too intricate—and too dangerous—to attempt alone. Manipulating fellow struggling… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Murder
  • Strangulation
  • Blackmail

The Conjoined by Jen Sookfong Lee

On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother’s belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery — two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother’s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng — troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver’s Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away. As Jessica learns more about Casey… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship (a forty-year-old man and a teenage girl)
  • Domestic violence
  • Miscarriage
  • Terminal cancer
  • Death of a parent

The Close-Up by Pip Drysdale

When Zoe Ann Weiss moves to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, her whole future is wide open. But then Zach, the bartender and aspiring actor she’s falling for, ghosts her. Her debut novel, a thriller, fails. And she has writer’s block worse than ever before. Now, three years later, Zach is famous and Zoe is… not. She’s facing her thirtieth birthday, a dead-end job at a flower shop, and a demanding agent, terrified she’ll never get her life back on track. But when she goes to make a flower delivery and Zach is at the address, it’s like no time has passed at all.. Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Kidnapping & stalking
  • Gun violence

You Can Run by Karen Cleveland

We have your son. It’s the call that’s every parent’s nightmare. And for CIA analyst Jill Bailey, it’s the call that changes everything. It’s Jill’s job to vet new CIA sources. Like Falcon, who’s been on the recruitment fast track. But before she can get to work, Jill gets the call. Her son has been taken. And to get him back, Jill does something she thought she’d never do. Alex Charles, a hard-hitting journalist, begins to investigate an anonymous tip: an explosive claim about the CIA’s hottest new source. This is the story that Alex has been waiting for. The tip–and a fierce determi… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Kidnapping of children

When We Had Forever by Shaylin Gandhi

Six months after her husband died in a car crash, Mina Drake is still mired in a haze of grief. Reminders of her years with Michael are everywhere, but beneath her heartache lies an even more painful emotion. It’s a guilty suspicion she can hardly admit to anyone, even herself—that her marriage was over long before Michael’s accident. They were good together once, she’s sure of it, sharing a connection so deep that Mina can’t understand how it unraveled. That is, until a chance discovery in her husband’s office—and the reappearance of Michael’s estranged… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcoholism recovery
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a husband in a car accident recounted

When I Was Ten by Fiona Cummins

Everyone remembered Sara and Shannon Carter, the little blonde haired sisters. Their Dad was the local GP and they lived in the beautiful house on the hill. Their best friend, Brinley Booth, lived next door. They would do anything for each other but everything shifted on that fateful day when Dr Richard Carter and his wife Pamela were stabbed fourteen times with a pair of scissors in what has become the most talked about double murder of the modern age. The girls were aged ten and twelve at the time. One, nicknam… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Physical & verbal child abuse in a foster care system, including forced starvation
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Murder of a mother & father by stabbing with scissors