9 psychological thriller novels to read in 2026 from Tana French, Jonathan Kellerman and more

Jigsaw reunites forensic psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis as they confront a seemingly disjointed string of violent deaths in Los Angeles. Each victim is connected in ways that are not immediately obvious, and the case soon becomes a labyrinthine puzzle that tests the pair’s assumptions about motive and pathology. One victim is an elderly woman found brutally murdered and stashed in a deep‑freeze, her home a cluttered hoarder’s den that hides both cash and clues that point to a wider network. As Delaware and Sturgis piece together links between the victims, the investigation edges into Milo’s own past, blurring professional distance and personal vulnerability. Kellerman uses the clinical, methodical tone of a forensic psychologist to frame a psychological thriller novel that is as much about the minds behind the killings as it is about the mechanics of catching them.

Five unfolds over the span of five minutes during a commute, with a single passenger destined to die before the train arrives at its next stop. The narrative introduces five strangers whose lives overlap in that brief window, each with their own unspoken histories, guilt and regrets. The reader is invited to map out who is likeliest to be the victim, and who is responsible, while the text pointedly refuses to resolve the question along the lines of conventional morality. Instead, Bannister leans into ambiguity, using the structure of minutes‑counting, interior monologue and shifting perspectives to build a slow‑burn portrait of how easily bias can colour judgment. The result is a psychological thriller novel that feels less like a whodunnit than an examination of complicity: the ways in which ordinary people collude with their own assumptions about who deserves to live or die.

The Plunge follows Liv, a playwright who survives a car crash off a coastal road in Northern California that kills the man she was about to marry. Traumatised and unable to write, she moves to New York and lives in a cramped maid’s room owned by a former college mentor, trying to rebuild a life on unsteady footing. Her fragile equilibrium is disrupted when she becomes obsessed with a mysterious couple she spots at a party, whose dynamic begins to mirror her own entanglement with desire and self‑deception. As she embarks on an intense affair with Damon and forms a complicated bond with Isabel, a journalist named Rex infiltrates her social circle and threatens to expose past indiscretions. Over one long summer that takes them from Long Island to Lake Como, Liv’s sense of reality and control erodes, turning what starts as a tense romance into a psychological thriller novel centred on the secrets people keep from themselves.

Set in 1966 Los Angeles, The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives follows three women—Beverley, Elsie and Margot—whose husbands are convicted serial killers. After the revelations of their partners’ crimes, they are publicly vilified and expected to vanish into shame, but instead they form an uneasy friendship during a sun‑drenched summer. When a new string of murders begins to surface, they recognise patterns that law enforcement overlooks and decide to use their intimate knowledge of serial‑killer behaviour to investigate. Arnott frames their work as both a reclaiming of agency and a quiet act of resistance against the way they have been reduced to the roles of “wife” and “enabler.” The novel is a psychological thriller that doubles as a character study, charting how trauma, stigma and female solidarity reshape the way each woman sees herself and the world around her.

How to Cheat Your Own Death continues Kristen Perrin’s Castle Knoll Mysteries, weaving together timelines in 1960s London and the present. In the 1968 storyline, psychology student Frances Adams moves to London, works as a diner waitress and begins a relationship with Ford Gravesdown, all while making new friends in gritty Soho. One of those friends, a socialite named Vera, confides that she has discovered a secret about someone powerful and fears for her life; before Frances can help, Vera is found murdered in a violently staged killing. Fast‑forward to the present, where Annie Adams—Frances’s great‑niece—returns to Castle Knoll to contend with a fresh mystery that echoes the unresolved questions of the 1960s case. The overlapping timelines and the inheritance of trauma make Perrin’s latest a psychological thriller novel that hinges on buried histories and the way old secrets can mutate into new threats.

Molka is set in an ordinary office building in Seoul, where IT technician Junyoung has access to the entire surveillance network and quietly monitors his colleagues. His voyeuristic oversight becomes a more sinister obsession when a hidden‑camera scandal involving the city’s elites begins to surface, implicating members of the company. One of the employees, Dahye, had hoped for a conventional romance, but the scandal fractures her social world and her sense of self, leaving her isolated and pursued by both public scrutiny and Junyoung’s watchful gaze. As her grip on reality falters and she begins to see visions of her dead sister, she is pushed toward extreme measures to expose the truth. Kim uses the architecture of the workplace and the mechanics of surveillance to construct a psychological thriller novel that interrogates voyeurism, consent and the lengths people will go to regain control.

Unreliable Narrator centres on Hope Jenkins, who in her early twenties takes an apprenticeship with the celebrated writer Rosie Glencourt, moving into his sprawling estate called Shadowlands. The house is a magnet for desire, secrecy and performance, and Hope is drawn into the charismatic orbits of Rosie and his enigmatic wife Delia, as well as a younger man named Tom who lives on the property. A violent incident—ending in a gunshot—ends her time at Shadowlands abruptly, and she leaves with a fractured sense of self and buried memories she has tried to suppress. Ten years later, living in isolation without family or close friends, Hope is forced to confront that past when she reads Rosie’s bestseller The Ruined Girl, which retells her story in intimate, exploitative detail. Hall turns this premise into a psychological thriller novel about narrative ownership, shame and revenge, asking how far someone will go to take back control of their own story.

My Husband’s Wife is narrated from the perspectives of two women who claim to be married to the same man. Eden Fox, an artist on the verge of her first major exhibition, moves into a house called Spyglass in the seaside village of Hope Falls, only to return from a run and find her key no longer fits and a woman she does not recognise answering the door. The stranger insists that Eden is the intruder, while the husband claims the newcomer is his wife, forcing Eden to question not only her memory but her identity. In the parallel storyline, Birdy, a reclusive Londoner dealing with a serious diagnosis, unexpectedly inherits Spyglass and arrives in Hope Falls, only to uncover a London clinic that claims to predict individual dates of death. The dual timelines and the unreliable accounts of both women create a psychological thriller novel that layers marital deception, medical anxiety and the destabilising power of withheld information.

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