As 2025 draws to a close, the year's crime fiction landscape has offered readers far more than simple puzzles of 'whodunit'. The finest thrillers have served as sharp instruments to dissect power structures, probe deep moral compromises, and examine the societal fractures caused by sudden violence. From intimate betrayals to systemic corruption, the genre's best this year have turned a mirror on complicity and the human condition.
The Standout Crime Novels of the Year
Curated by Paromita Chakrabarti, Senior Associate Editor at The Indian Express, a selection of five exceptional thrillers published in 2025 demonstrates the range and depth of contemporary crime writing. While occupying distinct tonal spaces—from sinister to contemplative—these books converge on universal themes: the nature of truth and deception, the simmering heat of rage and retribution, and the irreversible consequences of pivotal actions.
1. The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman
In The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman returns to the beloved quartet of elderly sleuths—Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim. However, the mystery at the book's heart evolves into a more reflective and poignant exploration. The narrative is deeply preoccupied with the passage of time—how it limits choices, intensifies loyalties, and transforms past decisions into present-day threats.
Osman's signature brisk and charming prose remains, but it is now layered with a new stillness, a palpable awareness of life's fleeting nature. The novel reinforces his skill in wrapping serious themes within an engaging package. Here, the focus is on the vulnerabilities of ageing: failing health, hidden regrets, and the dread of irrelevance. With violence often occurring off-page, its repercussions ripple through the lives of the characters, making The Impossible Fortune a tender meditation on justice, truth, and growing old in a youth-obsessed world.
2. Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson
Peter Swanson's Kill Your Darlings stands out as one of his most psychologically penetrating works. The story centres on a marriage between a poet and an English professor, a union constructed on a foundation of mutual betrayal. The novel refuses to offer clear-cut innocents, instead presenting characters grappling with varying degrees of self-justification.
Swanson masterfully demonstrates how charm can seamlessly morph into menace. Structured in teasing segments where revelations arrive indirectly, the clean, matter-of-fact prose heightens a profound sense of unease and emotional claustrophobia. This is an unsettling read precisely because it reveals how little it takes for ordinary existence to tilt into monstrosity, and how intimacy can become the most perilous landscape of all.
3. Fair Play by Louise Hegarty
Louise Hegarty's debut, Fair Play, presents itself as a classic whodunit with country-house aesthetics, but swiftly reveals a more ambitious core. The novel rigorously interrogates the very rules of the genre it follows. Hegarty displays remarkable confidence, focusing on concepts of fairness: whose voice is heard, which version of events is trusted, and what justice means when narrative itself is unreliable.
Characters are sketched with economical precision, their secrets emerging through what is left unsaid as much as through confession. While delivering the pleasures of a detective puzzle, the book also cultivates a subtle unease about manipulation—both by the author and through the reader's own complicity. Fair Play argues convincingly that crime fiction can be both an intellectual game and a philosophical discourse.
4. The Good Liar by Denise Mina
Scottish author Denise Mina's The Good Liar features forensic examiner Professor Claudia Atkins O'Sheil, who plans to “tell the truth” at a felicitation ceremony, an act she knows will blow her world apart. Set against a backdrop of institutional decay and personal compromise, the novel delves into corruption, greed, and revenge.
Mina, known for rejecting comforting truths, offers a bracing narrative that refuses moral simplicity. Her muscular prose is acutely aware of class, power, and the quiet violence embedded in everyday systems—how societies sanction certain lies and who suffers when those fabrications unravel. The plot builds with controlled tension, but the lasting impact is an ethical unease that resists any neat resolution.
5. Her One Regret by Donna Freitas
Donna Freitas's Her One Regret contributes to the growing literary exploration of motherhood's complexities. The plot is a taut thriller built around quiet devastations. Lucy Mendoza, a successful Rhode Island real estate agent, vanishes one afternoon from a grocery store parking lot, leaving her baby daughter in a shopping trolley.
The suspense is masterfully cumulative, constructed from small dissonances that slowly expose a life dominated by a single, corrosive secret. Freitas writes with clarity and restraint, allowing her characters' internal conflicts to drive the narrative. The novel's power lies in its attentive portrayal of female interiority, posing profound questions about choice, autonomy, and the crimes that fracture a person from within.
Why These Books Define 2025's Crime Fiction
Collectively, these five top thriller books of 2025 illustrate the genre's evolution from pure entertainment to a vehicle for serious social and psychological inquiry. They move beyond the mechanics of crime to investigate its roots in human failing, societal pressure, and moral ambiguity. For readers seeking stories that offer both gripping suspense and substantive reflection on power, truth, and consequence, this list provides an essential guide to the year's most compelling narratives in crime fiction.
