2025 Read Harder: Mystery + True Crime Edition
A new year brings a new Read Harder Challenge! Below are five great books to read just because, and, also because they each perfectly fit a prompt from Book Riot’s 2025 Read Harder Challenge. It’s a win-win for all mystery and crime readers as you can’t go wrong with any of these titles.
Read a book about a moral panic.
Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson
Because all moral panics are dangerously absurd, every part of this book is bananapants. Despite all the red flags surrounding the anonymous diary of a drug-addicted teen, Go Ask Alice was published in the ’70s and became a hit. This book dives not only into the fraud of that book, and its author, but also the drug panic and the Satanic panic.
Read a “cozy” book by a BIPOC author.
Murder in G Major (Gethsemane Brown Mysteries #1) by Alexia Gordon
I decided to go with one of my favorite series, which adds a ghost to the amateur-sleuth-in-a-small-town cozy mystery genre trope. American Gethsemane Brown uses her classical musician degree to teach a group of students in a small Irish town, but the cottage she stays in comes with a ghost, one who remains accused of killing his wife and himself. He has no interest in leaving Gethsemane alone (he’s a beggar!) until she can help clear his name and solve the murders.
Read a queer mystery.
Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie
This has so many tropes: archeologist lead, returning home to a small town, missing person cases, a haunting past…
With a degree in forensic anthropology, Syd Walker is currently preserving Indigenous history, working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Rhode Island branch. But when her badge is found with a skull, and her sister goes missing, she leaves her pregnant wife to head home to Oklahoma, where all her ghosts remain…
Read a book about obsession.
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel
Too on the nose with obsession in the title? This is for fans of nonviolent true crime, art, and heists. And, of course, obsession, as Stéphane Breitwieser, a prolific art thief, did not steal for money nor ever sold the pieces he stole.
Read a book about immigration or refugees.
Blackwater Falls (Blackwater Falls #1) by Ausma Zehanat Khan
I love Ausma Zehanat Khan’s books equally for the mysteries and her characters. After loving her Rachel Getty & Esa Khattak series, I was super excited to see that she’d started a new procedural series, this time set in Colorado. Once again, we have a pair of very different from each other detectives working together—Detective Inaya Rahman and Lieutenant Waqas Seif—both of whom I adore and look forward to watching as their lives are further explored. In the opening book, the mystery case centers a teen from a Syrian Muslim refugee family who was murdered and deliberately positioned in the local mosque.
If you want to join the Read Harder challenge, or get a ton of book recs, there’s a newsletter!
Browse the books recommended in Unusual Suspects’ previous newsletters on this shelf. See upcoming 2025 releases, and mysteries from 2024 and 2023. Check out this Unusual Suspects Pinterest board and get Tailored Book Recommendations! Until next time, keep investigating! In the meantime, come talk books with me on Bluesky, Goodreads, and Litsy.
If a mystery fan forwarded this newsletter to you or you read it on bookriot.com and you’d like to get it right in your inbox, you can sign up here.
