Kept Me Up All Night: Thrillers for Your Inner Detective

There was a period — after my second divorce, if I am being specific — when I stopped reading thrillers entirely. I had enough tension in my actual life. I didn’t need manufactured dread. I read poetry for two years. Rumi. Ocean Vuong. Mary Oliver on the gentle days.

And then a friend pressed Darling Girls into my hands and said “just the first chapter.” That was on a Thursday. I finished it Sunday morning with cold coffee and no regrets.

I am back. And I have thoughts.

Julie Chan Is Dead — Liann Zhang

Start here if you want to understand 2026’s reading climate, because this novel is doing something quietly extraordinary: it asks what it means to perform a life so consistently that the performance becomes the life — and what happens when it ends.

Julie is an influencer. She is dead. Her management team decides to keep posting. The novel follows the people left behind — family, colleagues, online community — and the way grief gets mediated through content strategy.

This made me think about my own relationship to social media for a full week after finishing it. I did not see that coming. Get it from novscentea here.

Darling Girls — Sally Hepworth

Three women. A shared childhood in a remote Australian children’s home. And a body.

What Hepworth understands — and what makes this better than most domestic thrillers — is that the horror is not the revelation. The horror is what people do to protect each other after surviving something together. The loyalty between these three women is both the warmest and the most dangerous thing in the book.

I cried twice. In a thriller. It is here when you are ready.

The Younger Wife — Sally Hepworth

Two Hepworths on one list, yes. I stand by it.

The Younger Wife works from a different angle: the adult children of a widower who has quickly, suspiciously, remarried someone much younger. Each narrator has a reason to resent the new wife. Each narrator is also hiding something. Hepworth never cheats her way to a twist — she earns it. By the end I had cycled through suspecting everyone at least twice.

It also, quietly, has quite a lot to say about the invisible labour of marriages. Which I noticed and found painful in a productive way. Pick it up here.

Murdle — G.T. Karber

A confession: a colleague handed me this as a joke and I spent four hours in a café working through puzzle-mysteries with a pencil and felt more engaged than I have by most actual novels this year.

Murdle is a puzzle book structured as whodunnits — you get the clues, you do the deduction, you check the answer. It sounds like a party game. The writing is genuinely funny. The mysteries are tighter than they have any right to be. Buy it for yourself and tell people it’s a gift. Nobody needs to know.

It is here.

Agatha Christie: Seven Deadly Sins Collection

Everything I said about complex, layered modern thrillers still stands. And yet: Christie.

After all the unreliable narrators and algorithm-mediated grief and suburban betrayals — Christie’s plotting is like watching a clock you haven’t wound in years start ticking again. The Seven Deadly Sins collection organises her stories thematically, which is a gift for anyone who appreciates architecture. Each sin carries its own suite of crimes. The satisfaction is nearly geometric.

We have the collection in store. If you want to remember why this genre exists in the first place, start there.

Thursday to Sunday. Four days. One well-timed recommendation from a person who knew exactly what I needed. That is what a good thriller does. These five will earn you several sleepless nights. Go in knowing that. Go in anyway.