12 New Mystery, Thrillers, & True Crime for March 2025

For fans of fun puzzle mysteries, stories featuring loving families, home libraries, murder mysteries, and cozy mysteries!

Tempest Raj went from being a Vegas stage magician to working at her dad’s very cool business of creating secret doors/passages/nooks in homes, but she has the bad luck of murders following her. This time there’s a real murder at what’s supposed to be a murder mystery dinner in a home being turned into a public library celebrating the greatest fictional detectives. Tempest and her friends are on the case when one of them looks to be the suspect. But first, they may have to get themselves out of an escape room turned not so fun…

A note on the series: You can start here and not be lost, but the first three books had a running subplot about a missing family member that is resolved in book 3. If you want to start at the beginning of this wonderful series, pick up Under Lock & Skeleton Key.

For fans of 1970s historical mysteries, amateur sleuths, and Indigenous leads!

Cash Blackbear is happy to live a quiet, hard-working life. But having been looked after by a sheriff who she is now friends with, she has a knack for solving murders. While on a farm job, Cash ends up finding a dead body and a young girl hiding, too afraid to talk. While searching for the girl’s mother in the White Earth Reservation— to stop her from going into foster care— Cash ends up with another body on her hands…

A note on the series: You can start here and not be lost, but if you’d like to follow this fantastic character throughout the series, pick up Murder on the Red River.

For readers of investigative journalism, and stories set in New York in the 1980s.

Through a series of interviews and court documents, Green brings the early ’80s New York creative scene to life while he investigates how 25-year-old Michael Stewart went from an arrest for alleged graffiti to being bruised and unconscious when police took him to the hospital, where he died. With plenty of witnesses testifying along with doctors, how were six officers found not guilty?

Backlist readers should also pick up Green’s previous work, Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York which has a docu-series you can now stream.

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For fans of all the slasher tropes, fun metafiction, and fictional copycat serial killers!

CJ lives in a town known solely for two massacres: CJ’s father survived the first and was killed in the second. CJ, however, survived the second, along with three siblings. Now their widowed mom has them training to survive a serial killer, which may come in handy when an anonymous manuscript predicting future murders shows up. CJ, a new friend, and a new crush, will have to figure out who the new murderer is while keeping themselves and their family alive! Will they go see what that noise was? Yup. Embody the final girl? All the hell yes!

For fans of dark academia!

In the tradition of dark academia, everyone’s got secrets they want to keep buried! Milo is back at Yates Academy on a mission to find out what really happened to his friend Ari after her death was ruled accidental. Fellow student and ruler of the school, Liam, is being anonymously blackmailed, accused of Ari’s murder. Wanting the threats to stop, he promises Milo he’ll stop the harassing campaign against him if he figures out who is behind the blackmail. What could go wrong?!

For fans of assassin stories, and past and present storylines!

Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are very different women with one thing in common: they’ve worked as a team for the Museum since the ’70s. They were trained assassins, sent on missions, and recently—at retirement age—had hits put out on them. Now the agency has a new assignment for them, and we also get to see their past missions—from undercover Playboy Bunnies to “whoopsie” killing the wrong mark.

You can start here and not be lost, but it gives away “solves” from the first also-very-fun book, Killers of a Certain Age.

For fans of retired spies, book club friends, and missing persons cases!

The series started with The Spy Coast and the past coming for Maggie Bird, a retired spy living in Maine, in a community with tensions between the seasonal and full-time residents. Maggie is part of a book club with drinking friends who are ex-CIA and are on the police chief’s radar. When a teen goes missing, Maggie tries to defend her neighbor, the prime suspect. But when a body is also discovered, past secrets threaten to be revealed…

For fans of crime short story collections (mysteries, procedural, noir, horror)!

F.H. Batacan is following up her mystery novel about crime-solving Jesuit Priests (Smaller and Smaller Circles) with a collection of short stories about crimes/criminals set in the Philippines. For fans of Smaller and Smaller Circles, you get the bonus of the return of Father Gus Saenz and Father Jerome Lucero in a murder mystery story!

For fans of accidental amateur criminals and sleuths, author leads, unlikely-ish duos, murder mysteries, and humor from books like the Stephanie Plum series!

Finlay Donovan is an author who’s always late on deadline, a mother of two young kids, and divorced. In a series of events at the start of the series (Finlay Donovan Is Killing It), she accidentally ends up entangled with criminals. She has since ended up partnering with her kid’s babysitter, Veronica, because Finlay not only accidentally finds herself in trouble often, but she and Veronica also manage to create it. Now Finlay and Veronica find themselves having to clear a neighbor of murder—even if she’s the most annoying busybody in the neighborhood—when Finlay’s ex-husband ends up on the suspect list!

For readers of historical true crime cases, and shining new light on famous true crime cases.

Following The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold returns with another true crime historical case with a focus on the victim. In 1910, performer Belle Elmore was murdered by her fraud of a husband, Hawley Harvey Crippen. What followed was the arrest and trial of Crippen and his typist/lover Ethel Le Neve. But with the amount of deception and fraud surrounding this infamous case, Rubenhold dives into the lives, history, and case trying to unravel what happened, with a spotlight on women who have fallen into the shadow of the telling of men’s stories.

For fans of neighborhood-set murder mysteries!

In a Washington, D.C. suburb, a group of neighbors get together on a weekly basis and enjoy each other’s company. That is until one gathering when one friend insults another by commenting on their parenting, and one, having drunk too much, whispers the title of this book into another’s ear before leaving. That would just be weird if he didn’t end up murdered the next day. Guess everyone is soon to be a suspect and some secrets are gonna come out…