End the Year Sleuthing: 8 New Mystery, Thrillers, True Crime for December 2024

For fans of plots that explore a specific industry, comic books, and character-driven murder mysteries!

Annie Bustamante is currently stuck in her career due to all the film/TV industry changes, plus her dream project has never been possible since the rights for the comic book hero that made her fall in love with comics as a kid, the Lynx, have never been available. That is until now. But all dreams come with a cost and Annie is about to pay it: the person holding the rights is less than ideal and is forcing Annie to team up with a currently disgraced director so that he can have his comeback. Will Annie listen when danger and threats are thrown her way to stop working on the project?

You can read this one as a standalone, but if you’d like to start at the beginning and watch how the Lynx came to be, pick up Secret Identity.

For fans of unique detective agencies, character-driven murder mysteries, and family drama!

Claudia Lin is now co-running Veracity, a detective agency that you hire in order to find out if the person you matched with on dating apps is actually telling the truth and who they say they are. She also grew up reading detective novels, so she’s down for some sleuthing beyond the work assigned: when murders appearing related to work occur, she gets to solving them. This time around, there’s some shady business going on with dating apps and AI that Claudia and her team are determined to get to the bottom of, all while working through a new crush and juggling family drama as the youngest child who was treated differently than her siblings growing up.

You’re given all the information you need to not be lost in The Rivals, but it hinges on things that happened in the first book. So if you want to start there, pick up The Verifiers!

For fans of literary crime, elderly women that are not sweet and cozy and are escalating revenge.

Maggie Burkhardt found herself depressed as an elderly widow and ended up making a home for herself living in hotels around the world. It’s where she found her purpose: secretly meddling in stranger’s lives to give them the outcome she thinks is best for them in life. Currently, she’s happiest in the Egyptian hotel Royal Karnak, where she has friends and feels useful and wanted. That is until a mother moves in with her eight-year-old son and Maggie’s attempt to meddle results in her being blackmailed by the child. Soon, the two, on the opposite spectrum of age, are one-upping each other in retaliation as the danger escalates to murder…

For fans of Japanese murder mysteries and consultants working with police detectives!

When a man is found dead in Tokyo Bay, it’s immediately ruled a murder because he was shot. When it comes to light that he abused his live-in girlfriend, who has taken her personal items and fled, she becomes the most likely suspect. The catch? Her alibi says otherwise. Enter Detective Galileo, a physicist who assists the police on cases because he follows every clue (that others miss) to piece the puzzle together.

It’s okay to read these out of order; this is technically the 10th in Japan but not all the books have been translated into English. But it’s a great series, so if you want to start at the beginning, pick up The Devotion of Suspect X, which has two film adaptations!

For true crime memoir readers of serial killer stories.

As an adult with a family of her own, April Balascio had never stopped thinking about the abuse she grew up with, nor a needling suspicion that her father was a killer. In 2009—still feeling there was overlap between the places she’d lived as a child and the places people disappeared from—she looked up one of the towns and discovered a case of murdered teens who were last seen where her father was working. She called a police hotline, and within a year, her father was arrested for the murders. Here Balascio tells her life story.

For fans of police procedurals with winter settings, murder mysteries, and revenge plots!

The book opens with unknowns murdering Brice Collier as “justice” for something his father did decades before. But Chicago PD detective Harri Foster and her partner and team have absolutely no leads beyond a dead young man’s body found in a field and a bunch of college kids saying they know nothing about it. Making Foster’s life even more difficult is her frustration with no one listening to her about her former partner’s death.

You’re given all the information you need to start with Echo but the lead is dealing with a death case from the previous book. If you want to watch it all unfold from the beginning, start with Hide.

For fans of crime novels, author leads, dark humor, family drama, and Weekend At Bernie’s.

David Alvarez went from the kind of success writers dream of with his debut novel to critics and readers panning his follow-up work. Now he is stuck and about to find inspiration in the worst way: he wakes up next to a dead man after their hookup. Rather than calling the police, he calls his larger-than-life literary agent. Her solution? Weekend at Bernie’s the body to get David as far away from being connected as possible. What could go wrong?!