Creepy Thriller Novels for the Fearless Reader

Ava rents Brodie’s Watch, an old house in Maine, only to find it’s still occupied by the ghostly ship captain Jeremiah Brodie, who begins to visit her regularly. She doesn’t mind the apparition until she learns that every woman who has lived at Brodie’s Watch has also died there. Is she next?

In Bleak Creek, North Carolina, in the early ‘90s, teens live in fear of being sent to Whitewood School, a local reform school charged with straightening out the unruly. The school operates despite the number of mysterious deaths in its past, until three friends decide to reveal the truth.

When two friends from college set out to canoe the Maskwa River in Canada, they don’t anticipate a wildfire adding serious urgency to the trip. After they hear a couple arguing at a nearby campsite, they try to warn them about the fire, but they only locate the man. Where is the woman?

Detective Harry Hole is in a living nightmare. He’s heartbroken after his partner leaves him, obsessed with a murderer he put behind bars who is being released from prison, and he’s just woken up from a blackout with blood on his hands—that isn’t his.

When the Swedish National Crime Unit receives videos of young women in their homes, unaware they’re being watched, only to find the same women turn up dead, they know they have a brutal serial killer on their hands. Detective Joona Linna taps a hypnotist for help but isn’t sure he can trust him.

Once a year, a road appears in the forest. Local legend says that the ghost of Lucy Gallows waits at the end, ready to take the lives of those who travel down the path. Sara knows she must face Lucy’s ghost—if only to find her sister Becca, who vanished on the same road last year.

When Abbie awakens with zero memory of how she got there, the man next to her tells her he’s a Silicon Valley scion and that she’s the perfect wife and mother and suffered a terrible accident five years ago. But as her memories slowly return, she wonders if she can believe him at all.