Thrillers and Suspense December 2025 |
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Her One Regret
by Donna Freitas
When successful Rhode Island real estate agent Lucy Mendoza vanishes, leaving her baby behind in a grocery store parking lot, the news quickly makes national headlines. Lucy's best friend Michelle is devastated, and terrified that Lucy's life is at stake. But she knows something that could complicate the police investigation. Lucy had confessed something unspeakable: she regretted becoming a mother, so much that she'd fantasized about faking her own kidnapping. If the police and media were to find out, Lucy would become a monster in public opinion. Michelle is sure Lucy would never abandon her daughter. But could she be wrong? Could Lucy have been so desperate she chose to escape her life?--
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With Friends Like These
by Alissa Lee
Harvard promised them everything. Ambitious futures, peers who pushed each other toward their absolute best, and an education that would open doors for the rest of their lives. And though they started out as roommates, Sara, Bee, Dina, Allie, Wesley, and Claudine soon became family. They had their whole bright lives ahead of them--until their senior year, when a shocking tragedy changed everything. Twenty years later, five of the roommates still indulge in a secret tradition they've kept alive since their campus days: the Circus, a harmless elimination-style 'killing' game played across the private rooms and hidden alleys of New York City. The game is a nod to their younger selves and a tribute to the sixth roommate they lost too young. But this year, Sara wants out of the game--until she discovers there is a small fortune awaiting the winner of this final round. As the Circus unfolds, Sara begins to suspect that the others aren't playing by the rules, and as the danger turns real and the old friends start pointing fingers, she discovers that even those closest to her harbor secrets of their own...secrets that could kill--
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The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel
by Michael Connelly
Following his resurrection walk and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty. Representing the victim's family, Mickey's case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails. Along the way he joins up with a journalist named Jack McEvoy, who wants to be a fly on the wall during the trial in order to write a book about it. But Mickey puts him to work going through the mountain of printed discovery materials in the case. McEvoy's digging ultimate delivers the key witness, a whistleblower who has been too afraid to speak up. The case is fraught with danger because billions are at stake. It is said that machines became smarter than humans on the day in 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov with a gambit called the knight's sacrifice. Haller will take a similar gambit in court to defeat the mega forces of the AI industry lined up against him and his clients--
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Crimson Thaw
by Bruce Robert Coffin
A detective's fall from grace. A rookie's baptism by fire. A town's secrets laid bare. ...reads like the real deal--a tale of trial and redemption...--Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire MysteriesIn the unforgiving wilderness of Maine, a disgraced detective must confront his past to solve a chilling murder.Detective Brock Justice's career is on thin ice. Once the golden boy of Maine State Police, Brock now finds himself exiled to the remote northeastern wilderness, punishment for crossing the thin blue line. Assigned to the Major Crimes Unit--North, he suffers the added indignity of partnering with newly-minted Detective Chloe Wright, a rookie with her own hidden struggles.The pair's uneasy alliance is put to the test almost immediately when a routine snowmobile retrieval in the coastal town of Blue Hill unexpectedly escalates into a full-blown murder investigation. Even as the case exposes the darkest corners of the town, their fragile partnership threatens to undermine the investigation at every turn.Brock and Chloe's hunt draws them into the lives of several intriguing locals: the town doctor, a biker gang involved in drug trafficking, a politically connected sheriff, and Brock's own father. With each revelation, the line between ally and enemy blurs, compelling Brock and Chloe to question their trust in everyone around them, including each other.Even as winter's icy grip loosens from Blue Hill, the noose of suspicion tightens. Brock must navigate not only a shaky partnership and a town harboring deadly secrets, but also the shadows of his own past. Can he and Chloe piece together the puzzle before Maine's wilderness swallows them whole?Retired Detective Sergeant Bruce Robert Coffin delivers a masterful blend of police procedural and small-town intrigue in this page-turning thriller. Perfect for fans of Craig Johnson's Longmire series and C.J. Box's Joe Pickett novels.
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Gone Before Goodbye
by Harlan Coben
Maggie McCabe is teetering on the brink. A highly skilled and renowned Army combat surgeon, she has always lived life at the edge, where she could make the most impact. And it was all going to plan ... until it wasn't. Upside down after a devastating series of tragedies leads to her medical license being revoked, Maggie has lost her purpose, but not her nerve or her passion. At her lowest point, she is thrown a lifeline by a former colleague, an elite plastic surgeon whose anonymous clientele demand the best care money can buy, as well as absolute discretion. Halfway across the globe, sequestered in the lap of luxury and cutting-edge technology, one of the world's most mysterious men requires unconventional medical assistance. Desperate, and one of the few surgeons in the world skilled enough to take this job, Maggie enters his realm of unspeakable opulence and fulfills her end of the agreement. But when the patient suddenly disappears while still under her care, Maggie must become a fugitive herself--Provided by publisher.
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The Widow
by John Grisham
Simon Latch is a lawyer in rural Virginia, making just enough to pay his bills while his marriage slowly falls apart. Then into his office walks Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow in need of a new will. Apparently, her husband left her a small fortune, and no one knows about it. Once he hooks the richest client of his career, Simon works quietly to keep her wealth under the radar. But soon her story begins to crack. When she is hospitalized after a car accident, Simon realizes that nothing is as it seems, and he finds himself on trial for a crime he swears he didn't commit: murder. Simon knows he's innocent. But he also knows the circumstantial evidence is against him, and he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. To save himself, he must find the real killer--Provided by publisher.
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Evil Bones
by Kathy Reichs
#1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs returns with a twisty, magnetic thriller featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, who finds herself enmeshed in a series of grisly animal killings that escalate into something far more sinister. Small creatures--a rat, a rabbit, a squirrel--have been turning up throughout Charlotte, North Carolina, mutilated and displayed in a bizarre manner. But one day, as Tempe is relaxing at home alongside her aimless, moody great-niece Ruthie, she's diverted by a disturbing call. The perp is upping the ante. This find could be human. Tempe visits the scene and discovers that the victim is a dog. Someone's pet. As one who has always found animal cruelty abhorrent, Tempe agrees to help apprehend the person responsible, and she acquires an equally outraged ally in semi-retired homicide detective Erskine Skinny Slidell. Needing a better understanding of possible motives, Tempe seeks input from a forensic psychologist. The doctor has no definitive answer but offers several possibilities, warning that the escalating pattern of aggression suggests even more macabre discoveries--and a shift in the perp's focus to humans. And then it happens. A woman is found disfigured and posed in a manner that mimics the animal killings. Subsequently, people Tempe cares about begin to go missing until it becomes clear she is being taunted, the target in a sick game that has her and Slidell racing against a ticking clock and facing a terrifying question: What is pure evil?
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Nash Falls
by David Baldacci
When Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network his life is turned completely upside down in this thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci. Nash is an intelligent man, tough but fair-minded. He has a wife and a daughter and a very high-level position at Sybaritic Investments, where his innate skills and dogged tenacity have carried him to the top of the pyramid in his business career. Despite never going on grand adventures, and always working too many hours, he has a happy and upscale life with his family. However, following his estranged Vietnam-veteran father's funeral, Nash is unexpectedly approached by the FBI in the middle of the night. They have an important request: become their inside man to expose an enterprise that is laundering large sums of money through Sybaritic. At the top of this illegal operation is Victoria Steers, an international criminal mastermind that the FBI has been trying to bring down for years. Nash has little choice but to accept the FBI's demands and try to bring Steers and her partners to justice. But when Steers discovers that Nash is working with the FBI, she turns the tables on him in a way he never could have contemplated. And that forces Nash to take the ultimate step both to survive and to take his revenge: He must become the exact opposite of who he has always been. And even that may not be enough.
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All This Could Be Yours
by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be Yours. In a different city every night, Tessa receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband Henry and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house. But there's a chilling problem with Tessa's triumphant book tour: she soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who's obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home. Tessa fears the fallout from an impossible decision she once made--what felt like a genuine deal with the devil--appears to be coming due. And she's realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can't untangle who's threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she'll lose her career, her family--and possibly her life--
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The Tin Men
by Nelson DeMille
Army CID Special Agents Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor team up for their toughest assignment yet as they are dispatched to Camp Hayden to investigate the death of Major Roger Ames, the chief scientist in charge of the top-secret war games being conducted between a platoon of Army Rangers and a fleet of 'lethal autonomous weapons.' Brodie and Taylor find themselves at ground zero of the next generation of warfare, and must untangle the complex web of alliances, animosities, and secret agendas among the men and women of the isolated facility. In a place cut off from the world and exposed to the harsh desert elements, everyone is a suspect -- from the zealous camp commander who pushes his men to the limit, to the Rangers slipping into madness due to isolation, grueling training, and rampant abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, to the late Major Ames's own research colleagues. Brodie and Taylor must uncover layers of deception to find the hidden hand behind the murder of Major Ames, and the real purpose of the activities at Camp Hayden and its terrifying arsenal of next-generation weapons.--Provided by publisher.
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Dead Ringer
by Chris Hauty
Nationally bestselling author Chris Hauty, one of the high-octane writers to take the thriller world by storm (The Real Book Spy), returns with a riveting stand-alone novel that explores what might have really happened at the JFK assassination. Set in present-day, a disgraced former Secret Service office and a Jesuit professor join forces to delve into the mysteries surrounding the events of November 22, 1963. Fixated on deciphering the conspiracies behind the history-changing assassination, they are oblivious to the fact that the cabal is still active--and may face an end as bloody as the carnage in Dealey Plaza. Will they be able to uncover the truth in time? Or will they become two more footnotes in history?
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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