Crime-fiction roundup 2025: From Richard Osman to Peter Swanson, the thrills, chills, and plot twists that stood out this year

The British writer’s great trick has always been to smuggle seriousness inside charm and what lingers here is the tenderness with which Osman treats his characters’ vulnerabilities — failing bodies, buried regrets, the fear of becoming irrelevant. Violence exists mostly offstage, its consequences rippling outward. The Impossible Fortune reinforces Osman’s interest both in the textures of truth and justice and what it means to age in a world that places its bets with singular devotion on the young.

Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

Kill Your Darlings is Peter Swanson’s most psychologically incisive works.

Peter Swanson has long excelled at twisting familiar crime tropes into darker, more intimate shapes, and Kill Your Darlings is among his most psychologically incisive works. At its core is a marriage between a poet and a professor of English, built on mutual betrayal.

There are no innocents here, only varying degrees of self-justification, and Swanson is unsparing in exposing how easily charm shades into menace. Swanson structures the novel in segments that tease and tantalise and where revelations arrive obliquely. The prose is clean, almost deceptively matter-of-fact, heightening the sense of unease and emotional claustrophobia. Kill Your Darlings is an unsettling read because it shows how little it takes for ordinary lives to tilt into something monstrous; for the realisation that intimacy can be the most dangerous terrain of all.

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty is a whodunit. (Source: amazon.in)

Ostensibly a classic whodunnit, complete with country-house echoes and formal constraints, Fair Play quickly reveals a sharper ambition: to interrogate the rules of the genre even as it obeys them. As a debut writer, Louise Hegarty shows rare confidence and intellectual rigour. She is fascinated by fairness – who gets to speak, whose version of events is believed, and what justice looks like when narrative itself is unreliable.

Hegarty’s characters are drawn with quiet economy, their secrets emerging through omission as much as confession. There is pleasure here in the mechanics of detection, but also a faint, unsettling awareness of manipulation: of the author’s hand, and the reader’s complicity. Hegarty uses Fair Play as a reminder that crime fiction can be both a mind game and a philosophical argument, and that the two need not be opposed.

The Good Liar by Denise Mina

Scottish writer Denise Mina’s The Good Liar features a forensic examiner. (Source: amazon.in)

An academic is also at the heart of Scottish writer Denise Mina’s The Good Liar. Professor Claudia Atkins O’Sheil is a forensic examiner who enters a felicitation ceremony determined to “tell the truth” — “In twenty minutes she would blow her world apart”.

Her revelation is electrifying but not merely for reasons the widowed scientist might have imagined. Set against a backdrop of institutional rot and personal compromise, the novel explores corruption, greed and revenge. Mina has never been interested in comforting truths, and The Good Liar is bracing in its refusal of moral simplicity.

Mina’s prose is characteristically muscular, alert to class, power and the quiet violence of everyday systems: how societies decide which lies are acceptable, and who pays when those lies collapse. The plot unfolds with controlled tension, but it is the ethical residue that lingers – a sense of unease that resists neat resolution.

Her One Regret by Donna Freitas

Her One Regret by Donna Freitas exploring the challenges and constraints of motherhood. (Source: amazon.in)

From Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects to Leila Slimani’s Lullaby, in recent years, there has been a growing corpus of literature exploring the challenges and constraints of motherhood. In Her One Regret, Donna Freitas reframes the trajectory by crafting a taut thriller that hinges on motherhood’s quiet devastations.

One ordinary afternoon, Lucy Mendoza, prominent Rhode Island real estate agent, vanishes from a grocery-store car park, leaving behind her baby daughter in a shopping trolley. Only months earlier she had confessed to her best friend that having baby Emma was her one big regret.

Had Lucy been kidnapped or had she hatched an elaborate ploy to abandon her child? Freitas writes with clarity and restraint, allowing the internal conflicts of her characters to do much of the work. The novel’s suspense is cumulative, built through small dissonances that gradually expose a life shaped by a single, corrosive secret. What makes the book compelling is its attentiveness to female interiority. The stakes are intensely personal, yet the novel gestures toward broader questions over choice, autonomy and will. Her One Regret is a reminder that the most dangerous crimes are often those that quietly fracture the self.