The Book Review: You asked, we answered
Plus: The forgotten writers who influenced Jane Austen
Books

February 21, 2025

The illustration shows five books covers on a pale orange background.

Dear fellow readers,

We recently launched this handy resource to help you find your next thriller, which includes lists of great legal thrillers, books about marriages gone wrong, stories set in hard-to-reach locations and more. In addition to recommending a wide range of our favorite thrillers, we also asked what you were looking for, and the responses have been thoughtful, surprising and delightful.

Some of the questions were fairly niche. One reader wanted “British thrillers set in remote areas of the U.K.” We have a few suggestions:

  • “The Hunting Party,” by Lucy Foley
    After a group of old friends arrive at their holiday destination — an isolated hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands — they’re socked in by a massive blizzard. Then one of them turns up dead.
  • “Written in Bone,” by Simon Beckett
    With an Arctic storm approaching, a forensic anthropologist has been dispatched to Runa, a remote island in the Hebrides, to investigate a mysterious death that looks, at least at first, like spontaneous combustion.
  • “Raven Black,” by Ann Cleeves
    In the bleakness of midwinter, a teenage girl has been murdered on Shetland — an island more than 100 miles off the northern coast of Scotland — setting off paranoia and suspicion in the insular community.

There were also some common themes. We heard from many readers who have gulped down everything available by their favorite thriller writer and are hungry for other books with similar vibes. For example, one reader asked: “I’ve read all of Tana French, and would love more books like these or authors like her. Any recs?” So many readers asked for Frenchesque reads, in fact, that we’ve added a whole list of suggestions to our thrillers guide. These are a few of our favorites:

  • “Case Histories,” by Kate Atkinson
    When the Edinburgh-based detective Jackson Brodie is called to work a grisly murder, the case draws him into a complex web of events dating back three decades.
  • “Cover Her Face,” by P.D. James
    The Scotland Yard detective chief inspector Adam Dalgliesh is summoned to an Essex manor house to investigate the death of a young maid who seems to have made enemies upstairs, downstairs and everywhere in between.
  • “The Dry,” by Jane Harper
    This swift, dazzling murder mystery is set in a desperately parched town in rural Australia, where nothing is what it seems.

We hope you’ll continue to share your book quandaries and wish lists with us — whether they’re related to thrillers, romance or anything in between! We read every question and will continue to answer them here and on the pages themselves.

You can email us at books@nytimes.com.

Jennifer Harlan
The New York Times Book Review

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