12 Mysteries & Thrillers We Think Would Make Fantastic Movies
With the recent adaptations of crime fiction books like The Housemaid and The Whisper Man, we’ve been thinking about all the gripping mysteries and pulse-pounding thrillers still waiting for their moment on the big screen. From twist-filled psychological suspense to atmospheric whodunits and edge-of-your-seat crime novels, there are countless stories with all the ingredients for unforgettable films. Here are the mysteries and thrillers we think deserve the Hollywood treatment next.
The Killer’s Wife (with Max DiLallo): Four girls have gone missing. Detective McGrath knows the only way to find them is to get close to the suspect’s wife … maybe too close.
We. Are. Not. Alone. (with Tim Arnold): The first message from space will change the world. It’s first contact: undeniable proof of alien life. Disgraced Air Force scientist Robert Barnett found it. Now he’s the target of a desperate nationwide manhunt—and Earth’s future hangs in the balance.
When undercover DEA agent Carter enters the picture, Sloan’s surprised to feel an immediate attraction between them, despite knowing that if Asa finds out, he will kill him. And Asa has always been a step ahead of everyone in his life, including Sloan. No one has ever gotten in his way.
No one except Carter.
Together, Sloan and Carter must find a way out before it’s too late…
Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.
Washed-up American heart throb George Abercrombie hates India, even from his apartment on the 68th floor of Mumbai’s grandest luxury skyscraper, the Pinnacle. He hates the noise, he hates the heat, and just maybe he’s grown to hate his wife, the newest queen of Bollywood, Sweety Sahota. So when George wakes from a drunken stupor to find Sweety murdered in their bedroom, he knows just how badly he’s cooked. But where is Sweety’s computer? Or her cellphone? And where has his personal assistant gone? As George scrambles to piece together the night, others in the building are covering their tracks. Sweety’s assistant must find who is blackmailing her, and a servant who knows too much goes on the run… The Pinnacle is a dazzling and addictive thriller that’s three plots in one, set against a world of lavish opulence where someone is always watching—because everyone is hiding something.
On a whim, Grady Kendall applies to work as a live-in caretaker for a luxury property in Hawaiʻi, as far from his small-town Maine life as he can imagine. Within days he’s flying out to an estate on remote Hokuloa Road, where he quickly uncovers a dark side to the island’s idyllic reputation: it has long been a place where people vanish without a trace.
When a young woman from his flight becomes the next to disappear, Grady is determined—and soon desperate—to figure out what’s happened to Jessie, and to all those staring out of the island’s “missing” posters. But working with Raina, Jessie’s fiercely protective best friend, to uncover the truth is anything but easy, and with an inexplicable and sinister presence stalking his every step, Grady can only hope he’ll find the answer before it’s too late.
Perfect for fans of Peter Heller and The White Lotus, and from award-winning writer Elizabeth Hand, a master of crime fiction known for her magnetic characters, seductive prose, and fearless excavations into the darkest corners of our world, comes a chilling and illuminating new novel about a place unlike any other—and the deadly cost of keeping it so.
Darren Mathews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who’s never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she’s not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage.
An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for ante-bellum Texas—and some of the era’s racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi’s disappearance has links to Darren’s last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy’s grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson.
Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself.
Two nights ago, a young woman brought her husband into the emergency room of the Sriphat Hospital in Thailand, where he passed away. A guard thinks she remembers her coming in before, but with a different husband — one who also died.
Ladarat Patalung, for one, would have been happier without a serial murderer-if there is one — loose in her hospital. Then again,she never expected to be a detective in the first place.
And now, Ladarat has no choice but to investigate. . .
The first novel in a captivating new series by David Casarett, M.D.
Frankie is a good daughter, a loyal best friend, and a model student, coasting through her final semester at an elite Catholic prep school in a wealthy Pittsburgh enclave. But acceptance to her dream college leaves her unmoored. When a classmate takes his life after posting a cryptic message about Woolf Whiting—a former student hockey player who died in a presumed suicide years earlier—Frankie and her best friend, Shiv, decide to investigate Woolf’s death as part of their journalism class project.
As the community mourns, a muffled conversation between Frankie’s mom, who teaches history at the school, and the priest who teaches her philosophy class draws the girls further into unraveling the mysterious life and death of Woolf. Frankie speaks to his sister, now a high-powered lawyer in New York; his former girlfriend, who Woolf’s mother is convinced knows more about his death than she has revealed; and his best friend. As she does, she discovers much more than she expected about the history of her supposed elite education—and the truth about her own past.
With a wry, send-up-the-patriarchy, wise-beyond-her-years narrator and a page-turning plot, Fine Young People is a cold-case mystery with a Hitchcockian twist and a portrait of a young woman searching for meaning in a world that values achievement above all else.
As the clock winds down to her death, Pierson has finally received a lead on her baby sister, abducted years ago. Kaylee’s dying wish: to know Leilani is safe and sound. Frankie is eager to possibly rescue a teenage girl, even if it involves flying to a remote atoll in the Pacific, where a charming tycoon is constructing an eco-resort—and possibly holding Leilani against her will. But now Frankie is trapped on an island with a dozen strangers and numerous deadly deceptions.
As the danger mounts, Frankie faces her toughest challenge with no chance of rescue, no hope of escape, and a massive storm rolling in …
“This book is a rocket. It had me upside down and inside out.” –Gregg Hurwitz, author of Orphan X
But Shaun has a burning need to find out the truth. His search is unsuccessful until he’s contacted by Chris Guzman, a woman who runs a website dedicated to matching missing-persons cases with unidentified bodies. Chris and her team of cold-case obsessives suspect that Shaun is looking for the “Boy in the Dress,” one victim in a series of gay men murdered by the same killer.
But who are these internet fanatics really, and how do they know so much about a case that has stumped police for decades? Soon armchair sleuths and professional investigators are on a collision course with a sadistic serial killer who’s gotten away with his crimes for far too long – and now they’re in his sights.
When Boady Sanden first receives the case of Elijah Matthews, he’s certain there’s not much he can do. Elijah, who believes himself to be a prophet, has been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the past four years, convicted of brutally murdering the pastor of a megachurch. But as a law professor working for the Innocence Project, Boady agrees to look into Elijah’s file. When he does, he is alarmed to find threads that lead back to the death of his colleague and friend, Ben Pruitt, a man shot to death four years earlier in Boady’s own home.
Ben’s daughter, Emma, has lived with Boady and Boady’s wife Dee ever since that awful night. Now fourteen years old, Emma has been growing distant, and soon makes a fateful choice that takes her far from the safety of her godparents. Desperate to bring her home, and to free an innocent man, Boady must do all he can to investigate Elijah’s case while fighting to save the family he has deeply come to love.
Written with energy, propulsion, and his characteristic pathos and insight, Eskens delivers another pitch-perfect legal thriller that reveals a twisted murder and explores faith, love, family, and redemption along the way.
A Black woman alone in a new city, Bree is stranded and out of her depth—especially when it becomes clear the dead woman is none other than Janelle Beckett, the missing woman the entire Internet has become obsessed with. There’s only one person Bree can turn to: her ex-best friend, a lawyer with whom she shares a very complicated past. As the police and a social media mob close in, all looking for #JusticeForJanelle, Bree realizes that the only way she can help Ty—or herself—is to figure out what really happened that last night.
But when people only see what they want to see, can she uncover the truth hiding in plain sight?
