Summer is the perfect time to fall into a great book — whether that means your heart racing for all the wrong reasons or all the right ones. This year’s releases are giving us thriller gold and romance heaven in equal measure. Here are 10 books from 2025 and 2026 that absolutely belong on your summer TBR.
🔪 THRILLERS
1. Cross My Heart — Megan Collins
The vibe: Obsession. Transplanted hearts. Unhinged protagonists done brilliantly.
Rosie Lachlan is a heart transplant survivor who becomes obsessed with the husband of her donor, local celebrity author Morgan Thorne. What starts as innocent grief-fuelled curiosity spirals into something far darker — and far more unputdownable.
This won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Thriller of 2026, and it absolutely deserves it. Collins writes an unreliable narrator like no one else — you’ll be rooting for Rosie even as you wonder if you should be. The premise alone had me saying what in the unhinged women fiction is happening and reading until 2am.
Perfect for: Fans of psychological thrillers with a morally grey protagonist you can’t help but love.
Tropes: Obsessive narrator, dark romance-adjacent, twisty whodunnit
Suspense Level: 🫀🫀🫀🫀
2. Dear Debbie — Freida McFadden
The vibe: Gone Girl meets Serial Mom. “Good for her” thriller energy, maximum.
Debbie Mullen is a New England housewife and advice columnist — the kind of woman who seems like she has it all together. But when she loses her job, discovers her husband is keeping secrets, and watches her daughters get stomped on by the world, Debbie decides enough is enough. She has always given great advice. Now it’s time she took some.
McFadden’s Debbie is a full-blown antihero — darkly funny, terrifyingly competent, and armed with an MIT-educated brain that her enemies seriously underestimate. This debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and had reviewers calling it “gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.” It is exactly that.
Perfect for: Anyone who has ever fantasised about consequences for the people who deserve them.
Tropes: Revenge thriller, unreliable narrator, domestic suspense
Suspense Level: ⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡
3. My Husband’s Wife — Alice Feeney
The vibe: Identity theft, but make it existential horror.
Eden Fox, an artist on the verge of her career-defining exhibition, returns from a morning run to find her key no longer fits her front door. A woman who looks eerily like her answers. Her husband insists that woman is his wife.
One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Alice Feeney is the undisputed queen of unreliable narrators, and this is arguably her best yet. Multiple POVs across multiple timelines — including a terminally ill Londoner named Birdy who inherits the same mysterious coastal house — converge in a finale that actually makes sense of everything (a feat in itself). The Washington Post called it “a funny, sexy, thoroughly satisfying read.” I call it a “never put it down once” thriller.
Perfect for: Fans of Rock Paper Scissors and Daisy Darker who want their minds thoroughly scrambled.
Tropes: Identity mystery, gaslighting, atmospheric coastal setting, multi-POV
Suspense Level: 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
4. The Keeper — Tana French
The vibe: Tana French doing what only Tana French can do — slow, suffocating, exquisite dread.
One of Goodreads’ most popular mysteries of 2026, The Keeper brings French’s signature atmospheric brilliance to another story of secrets buried so deep in a community they become part of its foundations. If you know French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, you already know this is a must.
Perfect for: Readers who want literary thriller — gorgeous prose, no shortcuts, the kind of ending that sits with you for weeks.
Tropes: Community secrets, psychological slow-burn, unreliable community
Suspense Level: 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️
5. It’s Not Her — Mary Kubica
The vibe: Domestic thriller with a missing-woman hook that refuses to be what you think it is.
Another Goodreads most-popular mystery of 2026, Mary Kubica delivers another razor-sharp domestic thriller in the vein of The Other Mrs. and Local Woman Missing. The title alone tells you something is beautifully, disturbingly off.
Perfect for: Fans of Lisa Jewell and Liane Moriarty who want propulsive, character-driven domestic suspense.
Tropes: Missing woman, domestic suspense, unreliable characters
Suspense Level: 🔍🔍🔍🔍
💕 ROMANCE & ROMCOMS
6. Great Big Beautiful Life — Emily Henry
The vibe: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets Beach Read. Emily Henry’s most ambitious book yet.
Alice Scott is a relentlessly optimistic journalist who’s been chasing her big break forever. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning human thundercloud. Both arrive on tiny, sun-drenched Little Crescent Island, Georgia — for the same reason: to write the biography of Margaret Ives, a reclusive former heiress who was once the tabloid princess of the 20th century.
Margaret will only choose one of them. The problem is that Alice is falling in love with Hayden.
This is a grumpy-sunshine, rivals-to-lovers romance wrapped inside a multigenerational family saga. Henry was challenged by this book — and you can feel it, in the best way. The Margaret storyline is absolutely captivating. Goodreads Choice Award winner for Readers’ Favourite Romance 2025.
Spice level: ☀️☀️
Tropes: Rivals to lovers, grumpy/sunshine, secret relationship, mystery heiress
7. The Night We Met — Abby Jimenez
The vibe: The slow-burn that will wreck you. In the absolute best way.
Larissa and Chris are the best friends — co-parenting a chaotic rescue Yorkie, sharing book recommendations, judging bread (pumpernickel for the win). Everything feels easy for the first time in Larissa’s life. The problem? She didn’t go home with Chris that night at the concert. She went home with his best friend, who became her boyfriend.
Chris wants her to be happy. But standing by is slowly killing him.
This is the sequel to Say You’ll Remember Me but reads perfectly as a standalone. Publisher’s Weekly named it a Top 10 Romance Release for Spring 2026. Jimenez writes the impossible situation — where the right person and the right timing refuse to line up — better than anyone in the genre.
Spice level: 🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Forced proximity (of the soul), best friends to lovers, love triangle, slow burn
8. Our Perfect Storm — Carley Fortune
The vibe: A summer romance drenched in Canadian sunlight, childhood nostalgia, and friends who have clearly been in denial for too long.
Frankie and George have been best friends since they were eight. Now thirty, after Frankie’s fiancé abandons her days before their wedding, George is there to pick up the pieces. But when they end up with one week together in paradise — everything changes.
Fortune describes the dynamic as her own Little Women homage: fiery, stubborn, prone to arguing. The book features an epistolary format alongside present-day chapters, a British Columbia setting (gorgeous), and the kind of friends-to-lovers payoff that makes readers literally cheer. Already a #1 bestseller.
Spice level: 🌶️☀️
Tropes: Friends to lovers, second chance at love, forced proximity, epistolary
9. And Now, Back to You — B.K. Borison
The vibe: Cozy, witty, and utterly swoony — Borison’s particular brand of romance magic.
B.K. Borison consistently delivers romcoms with perfect banter, slow-burning chemistry, and that warm, fuzzy feeling that makes you want to reread chapters immediately. 2026’s release continues that tradition. If you loved In a Holidaze energy or anything by Christina Lauren, Borison is your author.
Spice level: 🌶️🌶️
Tropes: TBD based on setup — expect banter, forced proximity, and feelings denied too long
10. Two Can Play — Ali Hazelwood
The vibe: Smart, spicy, and sharp — Hazelwood’s signature STEM-meets-romance formula with extra fire.
Ali Hazelwood became the queen of STEM romance with The Love Hypothesis and hasn’t slowed down since. Two Can Play continues her run of giving us brilliant, nerdy women who are absolutely terrible at admitting they have feelings — and incredibly compelling men who see through every defense they put up.
Hazelwood’s writing is funnier than it gets credit for, her heroines feel genuinely intelligent, and her romances burn slow before they ignite completely.
Spice level: Spicy 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Smart women, enemies-to-lovers energy, intellectual banter, slow burn to fast ending
Happy reading! Drop your summer TBR in the comments — I want to know what you’re picking up first. 📚
