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The Best Summer Thriller Books to Read this Year

Summer is upon us and the heat is rising! Make sure you are ready for this year’s beach season with this list of amazing Summer Thriller Books! Here are 12 suspenseful thriller books to read for the 12 weeks of summer. I am so excited to work my way through this list. Do you prefer paper book, kindle or audible?

The Best Summer Thriller Books to Read this Year

At the end of this post, make sure to print out the list to save for later. These are some of the best thriller books of this year – sure to keep you distracted from the heat and humidity.

Into the Water / by Paula Hawkins

#1 – Into the Water / by Paula Hawkins

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

BUY NOW: Into the Water


Sharp Objects / by Gillian Flynn

#2 – Sharp Objects / by Gillian Flynn

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.

BUY NOW: Sharp Objects


Big Little Lies / by Liane Moriarty

#3 – Big Little Lies / by Liane Moriarty

Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She’s funny and biting, passionate, she remembers everything and forgives no one. Her ex-husband and his yogi new wife have moved into her beloved beachside community, and their daughter is in the same kindergarten class as Madeline’s youngest (how is this possible?). And to top it all off, Madeline’s teenage daughter seems to be choosing Madeline’s ex-husband over her. (How. Is. This. Possible?).

Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare. While she may seem a bit flustered at times, who wouldn’t be, with those rambunctious twin boys? Now that the boys are starting school, Celeste and her husband look set to become the king and queen of the school parent body. But royalty often comes at a price, and Celeste is grappling with how much more she is willing to pay.

New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for the nanny. Jane is sad beyond her years and harbors secret doubts about her son. But why? While Madeline and Celeste soon take Jane under their wing, none of them realizes how the arrival of Jane and her inscrutable little boy will affect them all.

Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves just to survive.

BUY NOW: Big Little Lies


Big Little Lies / by Liane Moriarty

#4 – How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir / by Cat Marnell

At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep.

This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve.

From the Condé Nast building (where she rides the elevator alongside Anna Wintour) to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell shows—like no one else can—what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no.

Combining lightning-rod subject matter and bold literary aspirations, How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.

BUY NOW: How to Murder Your Life


Sister Sister: A gripping psychological thriller / by Sue Fortin

#5 – Sister Sister: A gripping psychological thriller / by Sue Fortin

Alice: Beautiful, kind, manipulative, liar.

Clare: Intelligent, loyal, paranoid, jealous.

Clare thinks Alice is a manipulative liar who is trying to steal her life.
Alice thinks Clare is jealous of her long-lost return and place in their family.

One of them is telling the truth. The other is a maniac.
Two sisters. One truth.

BUY NOW: Sister Sister


Cross the Line (Alex Cross) / by James Patterson

#6 – Cross the Line (Alex Cross) / by James Patterson

After shots pierce the tranquil nighttime calm of Rock Creek Park, a man is dead: what looks at first like road rage might be something much more sinister. But Alex has only just begun asking questions when he’s called across town to investigate a new murder, one that hits close to home: Washington’s own chief of detectives. And Alex’s former boss, beloved mentor of Alex’s wife, Bree.

Now there’s a killer on the loose, a long list of possible suspects, a city in panic, and nobody in charge of the besieged police force.
Until Bree gets tapped for the job.

As Bree scrambles to find her footing and close two high-profile cases, new violence stuns the capital. What should be a time for her to rely on Alex for support and cooperation is instead a moment of crisis in their marriage as well as their city when their investigative instincts clash and their relationship reaches a breaking point.

And the fiendish mind behind all the violence has appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner, with a terrifying master plan he’s only begun to put in motion. To beat him at his own game, Alex and Bree must take the law back into their own hands before he puts them both out of commission…permanently.

BUY NOW: Cross the Line


The Orphan's Tale / by Pam Jenoff

#7 – The Orphan’s Tale / by Pam Jenoff

Sixteen-year-old Noa has been cast out in disgrace after becoming pregnant by a Nazi soldier and being forced to give up her baby. She lives above a small rail station, which she cleans in order to earn her keep… When Noa discovers a boxcar containing dozens of Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp, she is reminded of the child that was taken from her. And in a moment that will change the course of her life, she snatches one of the babies and flees into the snowy night.

Noa finds refuge with a German circus, but she must learn the flying trapeze act so she can blend in undetected, spurning the resentment of the lead aerialist, Astrid. At first rivals, Noa and Astrid soon forge a powerful bond. But as the facade that protects them proves increasingly tenuous, Noa and Astrid must decide whether their friendship is enough to save one another—or if the secrets that burn between them will destroy everything.

BUY NOW: The Orphan’s Tale


The Woman in Cabin 10 / by Ruth Ware

#8 – The Woman in Cabin 10 / by Ruth Ware

In this tightly wound, enthralling story reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s works, Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

With surprising twists, spine-tingling turns, and a setting that proves as uncomfortably claustrophobic as it is eerily beautiful, Ruth Ware offers up another taut and intense read in The Woman in Cabin 10—one that will leave even the most sure-footed reader restlessly uneasy long after the last page is turned.

BUY NOW: The Woman in Cabin 10


The Couple Next Door / by Shari Lapena

#9 – The Couple Next Door / by Shari Lapena

It all started at a dinner party…

A domestic suspense debut about a young couple and their apparently friendly neighbors—a twisty, rollercoaster ride of lies, betrayal, and the secrets between husbands and wives. . .

Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all—a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately focuses on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story.

Inside the curtained house, an unsettling account of what actually happened unfolds. Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something. Both Anne and Marco soon discover that the other is keeping secrets, secrets they’ve kept for years.

What follows is the nerve-racking unraveling of a family—a chilling tale of deception, duplicity, and unfaithfulness that will keep you breathless until the final shocking twist.

BUY NOW: The Couple Next Door


The Fix (Amos Decker series) / by David Baldacci

#10 – The Fix (Amos Decker series) / by David Baldacci

Amos Decker witnesses a murder just outside FBI headquarters. A man shoots a woman execution-style on a crowded sidewalk, then turns the gun on himself.

Even with Decker’s extraordinary powers of observation and deduction, the killing is baffling. Decker and his team can find absolutely no connection between the shooter–a family man with a successful consulting business–and his victim, a schoolteacher. Nor is there a hint of any possible motive for the attack.

Enter Harper Brown. An agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency, she orders Decker to back off the case. The murder is part of an open DIA investigation, one so classified that Decker and his team aren’t cleared for it.

But they learn that the DIA believes solving the murder is now a matter of urgent national security. Critical information may have been leaked to a hostile government–or worse, an international terrorist group–and an attack may be imminent.

Decker’s never been one to follow the rules, especially with the stakes so high. Forced into an uneasy alliance with Agent Brown, Decker remains laser focused on only one goal: solving the case before it’s too late.

BUY NOW: The Fix


Before the Fall / by Noah Hawley

#11 – Before the Fall / by Noah Hawley

On a foggy summer night, eleven people–ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter–depart Martha’s Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable happens: the plane plunges into the ocean. The only survivors are the painter Scott Burroughs and a four-year-old boy, who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul’s family.

Was it by chance that so many influential people perished? Or was something more sinister at work? A storm of media attention brings Scott fame that quickly morphs into notoriety and accusations, and he scrambles to salvage truth from the wreckage. Amid trauma and chaos, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy grows and glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, morality, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.

BUY NOW: Before the Fall


The Good Widow / by Liz Fenton

#12 – The Good Widow / by Liz Fenton

Elementary school teacher Jacqueline “Jacks” Morales’s marriage was far from perfect, but even in its ups and downs it was predictable, familiar. Or at least she thought it was…until two police officers showed up at her door with devastating news. Her husband of eight years, the one who should have been on a business trip to Kansas, had suffered a fatal car accident in Hawaii. And he wasn’t alone.

For Jacks, laying her husband to rest was hard. But it was even harder to think that his final moments belonged to another woman—one who had left behind her own grieving and bewildered fiancé. Nick, just as blindsided by the affair, wants answers. So he suggests that he and Jacks search for the truth together, retracing the doomed lovers’ last days in paradise.

Now, following the twisting path of that fateful road, Jacks is learning that nothing is ever as it seems. Not her marriage. Not her husband. And most certainly not his death.

BUY NOW: The Good Widow


The Best Summer Vacation Books to Read this Year

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Linda

Thursday 27th of July 2017

Great suggestions. Thanks for sharing at What'd You Do This Weekend?

Wishes for tasty dishes, Linda

Sue from Sizzling Towards 60 & Beyond

Wednesday 26th of July 2017

I've just finished Into the Water and also loved Big Little Lies. Thanks for the other suggestions which I will check out. Great to have you link up with us at #overthemoon link party.

Vicki

Wednesday 26th of July 2017

I need to read those! I am reading The Woman in Cabin 10 right now.

Susan Champion

Monday 24th of July 2017

I can't wait to get started in this list. I love thrillers. Most I already had on my TBR (To Be Read) List, but I added The Good Widow and The Couple Next Door just now. Thanks for the suggestions.

Cathy

Sunday 23rd of July 2017

I love finding new books to read - especially suspense novels. I am in the middle of The Woman in Cabin 10 and enjoying it very much. Thanks for sharing your list. Definitely found a few I am going to dig into.

Vicki

Wednesday 26th of July 2017

I am reading that one right now too! Love it.

Hil

Thursday 6th of July 2017

These look like they would scare the crap out of me!! I love some new reading ideas though!

Thanks for sharing at #bloggerspotlight