Jezebel’s Must-Read Thrillers of Summer 2026

Romantasy may be the hottest genre in the publishing world right now, with its epic stakes and complex relationship dynamics, but, as an established genre, it hasn’t actually been around all that long. And in the summer reading sweepstakes, there’s something to be said for a reliable old favorite that’s still managing to delight and innovate in a breadth of thrilling (yes, that pun is on purpose) new ways.

Many of us almost certainly associate thrillers with summertime. Their fast-paced plots and page-turning twists tend to make them the perfect beach or vacation reads — who doesn’t love tearing through a book in an afternoon poolside?  And modern thrillers truly contain multitudes, incorporating elements from more traditional murder mysteries and whodunits right alongside domestic tension, psychological anxiety, and even satire. (The relentlessly unbearable tension kind of goes without saying.) 

But for many readers, the sheer breadth of the thriller genre can often feel overwhelming, particularly when it seems as though a dozen new titles arrive at your local bookstore every week. Allow us to help—we’ve got recommendations across new summer releases, the latest titles from some of the biggest authors in the space, and a handful of books from earlier this year that deserve a second look. 

Buzzy Summer Releases

Thanks to the sheer number of new thrillers, suspense, and mystery books released each week, it can feel impossible to know what to try first. These are a handful of the most intriguing new summer releases to fill out your TBR list in the months ahead.

 

Helpless by Jessica Knoll 

The latest novel from the author of Bright Young Women and Luckiest Girl Alive is a dark psychological tale of sexual obsession and memory that follows the story of a successful Hollywood producer who returns to her college town for a former professor’s funeral and is kidnapped by her toxic ex-boyfriend.

Even the book’s marketing materials will tell you that this plot summary isn’t a spoiler, as the twisty tale goes on to explore themes of attraction, power, and control. One part erotic thriller and one part dark romance, the book’s ending will undoubtedly have readers buzzing later this summer, for reasons both good and ill. (Heed the trigger warnings before you dive in.)

 

Tell Your Friends by Lauren Wilson

One of the more interesting and timely trends in the world of thriller and suspense fiction these days is the rise of stories based in influencer culture. (See also: Summer juggernaut Yesteryear.) Social media has opened the door to a lot of bizarre and frequently parasocial relationships, and a brand new world of stories about them, exploring everything from obsession and greed to performative identity and power.

Tell Your Friends, the sophomore novel from The Goldens author Lauren Wilson, digs into the burgeoning world of family influencers, asking complicated questions about honesty and consent, particularly regarding the idea of children as content. The story follows Crystal Shaw, daughter of a megapopular British vlogging family, who has essentially grown up as part of her parents’ online brand, with her life painstakingly documented and presented online in ways she never consented to. But when she heads to London for college, she’s determined to bring down her family’s online media empire and free her siblings from its influence. There’s just one problem: Her new friend Alyssa, who is obsessed with the Shaws and the image they represent, and will do anything to preserve it. How far is she truly willing to go to do so?

Fruit Fly by Josh Silver

A sharp, unflinching satirical thriller from the author of Happy Dead, Fruit Fly is one part razor-sharp takedown of the worst excesses of a publishing industry out to exploit its authors’ various traumas and marginalized identities for profit and one part genuinely compelling and deeply disturbing tale of emotional manipulation. The story follows Mallory Maddox, a former literary sensation who has spent the past seven years struggling to recapture her spark as a writer.  Desperate for a hit to make her relevant again, she becomes obsessed with Leo, a young queer addict barely surviving in London’s seedy underbelly, and decides to appropriate his story for her next work. What follows is a story about exploitation, entitlement, and suffering as content, in which boundaries around consent, observation, and participation rapidly collapse.

Silver’s prose is whip smart, deeply funny, and incredibly uncomfortable by turns, and if there’s any justice, it’s going to be a huge hit when it hits shelves this summer. Unlike anything else on this list, and unlike anything else you’ve read in a long, long time. 

 

The Anniversary by Alex Finlay

The latest twisty offering from the author of Parents’ Weekend and What Have We Done, The Anniversary is a serial killer thriller with an entertainingly unique format. The story spans a decade, but is told over just one day each year, following the story of two characters in the path of the May Day Killer, who strikes every—you guessed it—May 1.

The story begins in 1992, when seventeen-year-old Jules Delaney leaves a concert and is assaulted in her car by a man she believes to be the May Day Killer, a murderer and rapist who has been stalking various Midwestern states since the 1980s. That same day, Jules’s classmate, Quinn Riley, is involved in a fight at that same concert and winds up in prison. While serving his sentence, his mother is bludgeoned to death in her home. A year later, Quinn is dedicated to finding his mother’s killer, and his search brings him to Jules, still struggling in the aftermath of her own attack. Each subsequent May sees their search for a monster escalate, as dark secrets come to light and Julia and Quinn are drawn closer together. Some of Finlay’s twists are predictable, but the format keeps the pace propulsive.

The Last to Drown by Noelle W. Ihli

Survival thrillers are a particularly unique brand of anxiety-inducing escapism—mixing beautiful settings and exhilarating adventure with the inevitable threat of something sinister lurking in the background. The Last to Drown follows Kaia, who joins a group of strangers for the white water rafting trip of her dreams. But the trip rapidly devolves into a nightmare when strange events begin to occur, eerily mirroring those that happened on this same stretch of river years prior, when a deadly massacre took place.

As food supplies disappear, strange accidents take place, and group members begin to go missing, everyone starts to suspect each other. (Warning: This thriller is a bit on the gorier side than most of the other titles on this list, so be aware if that’s something you’re not into.)

New Titles From Familiar Faves

Thriller, mystery, and suspense authors are some of the most prolific in any genre, turning out an impressive array of stories that wrestle with all kinds of themes and tropes. These are the latest can’t-miss offerings from some of the genre’s heaviest hitters. 

 

It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell 

Regular readers of the thriller/suspense genre are already well familiar with Lisa Jewell, one of the most iconic authors in the space who has written over two dozen novels, including None of This Is True, And Then She Was Gone, and The Family Upstairs. And her latest puts a memorable supporting character from her 2025 thriller, Don’t Let Him In, center stage in her own story. 

Jane Travelley is twice divorced, lonely, and living an isolated life in a ramshackle house she inherited from her parents but can’t quite bring herself to get rid of. Her life takes a turn when she finds a lost dog that her neighbors claim belonged to a girl who’s gone missing. Returning the animal to the London home registered on its microchip, she finds herself reminded of a haunting incident from her own past, when she believes herself to have barely escaped mortal danger. The man who answers the door claims not to know the missing girl, but Jane doesn’t believe him and decides to investigate the disappearance on her own—a choice that will require her to confront her own long-buried traumas and the dark history of the family in that mysterious house. 

Jewell gleefully plays with many Gothic suspense tropes, and the quite literal house of horrors that sits at the center of her story is suitably dark and diabolical. (As are the people who live there.) It’s a bit of a slower-paced tale than many of Jewell’s previous efforts, but as Jane unravels the mysteries of past and present simultaneously, her character is granted satisfying depth and agency. 

 

The Unknown by Riley Sager

Riley Sager is another author whose name is essentially synonymous with summer thrillers, and anyone who reads even semi-regularly in this genre has probably tried one of his many popular novels, such as Final Girls, Home Before Dark, or The House Across the Lake. The predictably prolific Sager is back to kick off another summer reading season with The Unknown, a genre-bending ghost story about a mysterious disappearance and the haunting ways history can and does repeat itself. 

The book follows the story of a struggling actress named Marin Keen, who unexpectedly lands a role in a major film about the unsolved mystery of New Avalon, a remote Vermont island where five women disappeared without explanation in 1926. But when she and her castmates are sent on a weeklong boot camp trip to the island in the name of “research”, they find that unsettling things are still happening in New Avalon a century later, from the appearance of bizarre carvings and inexplicable noises in the night to members of the cast going missing. (Yes, in the exact same order as the characters they’re meant to portray did.) 

Sager makes the familiar beats and tropes of a closed-circle whodunit feel fresh, and though the twists are a bit on the tamer side than he usually prefers, fans will still find plenty to enjoy here.

 

Thornbird by E. Kennedy

Romance author Elle Kennedy is having a big year. Not only is her Off Campus series winning a legion of new fans thanks to the popular Prime Video TV adaptation, but she’s also dipping her toe into a brand new genre: The young adult thriller. And Thornbird certainly represents a whole new direction for the author—the story is a remarkably thoughtful exploration of the long-tail impacts of violence and trauma, told through the eyes of a young girl trying to reckon with her family’s past. (Don’t worry, though, there’s still a dash of romance, too.) 

Thornbird follows Ryan, the daughter of a serial killer who’s currently on death row for killing seven women, including her mother. Forced to return home to her small Tennessee town to move in with her aunt and uncle after her grandmother’s death, Ryan can’t escape her past—or the way that everyone’s interest in her father’s crimes has skyrocketed as the date of his impending execution gets closer. 

As she tries to reconcile her memories of her father with the heinous crimes he was convicted of, her cousins are diving back into the case, two of many casual sleuths determined to locate the victims’ bodies (and claim a hefty reward), and Ryan is drawn into their investigation in ways that challenge both her courage and her heart. The true crime elements are well done, and Kennedy’s characters are surprisingly nuanced in a story that could all too easily skew black and white. 

Recent Hits

While there is no shortage of new thriller books hitting shelves this summer, let’s not forget all the must-read titles that arrived before the weather turned warm. These are a few recent releases from earlier this year that are still worth checking out.

 

My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney

At least a half dozen of Alice Feeney’s megapopular thrillers are in development as TV shows and feature films, and it’s easy to see why. Full of jaw-dropping twists, messy characters, and unreliable narrators, they’re fast-paced, easily bingeable, and often feel impossible to put down. (The “just one more page” urge is very real.) Feeney’s recent hits include His & Hers, Good Bad Girl, and Beautiful Ugly, but her latest, published earlier this year and titled My Husband’s Wife, may just be her wildest story yet. 

Featuring multiple unreliable narrators, My Husband’s Wife has the kind of ridiculous-on-the-surface premise that means its story really shouldn’t work at all. And yet, this story of a woman who comes home from an evening run to find her key no longer works in her front door and a similar-looking stranger has taken over her life and identity, is propulsive and unhinged in equal measure. Some of its more complicated twists don’t necessarily hold up if you look at them too closely, but the ride is both fast and fun. 

 

All the Little Houses by May Cobb

If you’ve watched Netflix’s The Hunting Wives—and if you haven’t, consider this a plea to fix your life immediately—then you already know that May Cobb is unmatched when it comes to writing stories about both East Texas culture and messy, generally unhinged groups of women. Her latest novel All the Little Houses, basically takes everything we’ve loved about Cobb’s work and turns it all up to eleven in this story of mean girls, meaner moms, and everything in between. 

Set in the small town of Longview, Texas in the 1980s, the story follows a new-money mother-daughter who butt heads with both the town’s traditionally wealthy queen bees and newly arrived farmgirl Jane and her Instagram-perfect tradwife-style family. The Desperate Housewives vibes essentially write themselves, but the secrets and scandals take a dark turn when a popular Longview teen turns up dead, and both Nellie and Jane are suspects.

Multiple POVs allow us in the heads of several characters, including nouveau rich mom Charleigh, her daughter Nellie, and Jane, and the story offers a first from Cobb—a cliffhanger ending! But, not to worry, the sequel, All the Little Secrets, is set to hit shelves in November.

 

The Storm by Rachel Hawkins

Rachel Hawkins’ thrillers are notoriously hard to pin down. Her stories run the gamut from Jane Eyre retellings (The Wife Upstairs) to 1970s-style takes on the famous real-life summer at Villa Dodati that created Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (The Villa). Reckless Girls has Yellowjackets meets And Then There Were None vibes. And The Heiress is a Gothic tale of generational wealth and family deceit. 

The Storm, which hit shelves earlier this year, feels a bit like all and none of Hawkins’s previous efforts. The story follows fiftysomething Gloria “Lo” Bailey, who returns to the Alabama tourist town where she was accused of killing her married lover decades earlier in the hopes of setting the story straight. (Or at least getting the tabloids who insist she really did it off her back.) But is Lo really looking to clear the air or get revenge? The dual timeline story, which shifts between Lo’s return to St. Medard’s Bay and the days leading up to Landon Fitzyroy’s death (as well as the storm that gives the novel its name), weaves a complicated web built of everything from emails and newspaper clippings to an unfinished manuscript. 

 

Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden

Freida McFadden is having something of a moment this year, thanks to the box office success of the film adaptation of her novel The Housemaid. (Other titles you might recognize include, but are not limited to The Dinner Party, The Wife Upstairs, The Intruder, and sequel The Housemaid’s Secret, which is almost certainly going to be headed to a cinema near you in short order.) 

Her latest novel, Dear Debbie, is almost certain to delight the raft of new readers she’s acquired in 2026, a gleeful and darkly comedic revenge tale that makes no apologies for its sadistic heart. The story of a frustrated advice columnist who takes matters into her own hands after she loses her job for telling a reader to get a divorce, it’s indulgent, entertaining, and genuinely funny—not to mention has an antiheroine for the ages. Let ‘em know, Debbie.