Looking for a YA Thriller? These Books Will Keep You Turning Pages

If you’re looking for a twisty turner teen thriller, these recent YA books about teens in dangerous situations may be just what you’re looking for.

The Follower by Kate Doughty

If you've ever watched HGTV while listening to a true crime podcast, The Follower is for you! The Cole triplets are an Instagram sensation, following their house-flipping parents from one dramatic renovation to the next and racking up sponsorships along the way. It’s a glamorous life — but not always a fun one, since every moment has to be painstakingly captured in a succession of filters and the teens always have to have their camera faces on. Cecily is burned out on being the pretty one, brother Rudy just wants to keep everything rolling smoothly, and Amber can’t help but notice that her plus-size body gets edited out of family photos too often. Plus there’s the problem that their parents’ Instagram-famous renovations aren’t doing much to put a dent in the family’s giant debt.

Now they’re on their biggest project yet: a huge mansion in a small town which is famous for the gruesome murders that took place there — and rumors that it might be haunted. The triplets play up the haunted house angle for the camera, but they can’t help noticing that weird things ARE happening. Stuff goes missing, suspicious shadows move along the hallway, and that’s just the beginning. Someone doesn’t want the Coles in this house.

The triplets are interesting people in their own right and not a homogenous lump, which is nice. Amber, especially, finds that their new small town life suits her: She starts stepping out from behind her picture-perfect sibs (with lots of support from them, which is lovely), finds a girlfriend, and starts to find herself. The trio’s relationship is believably complicated but mostly warm and supportive — they’re different people, but they love each other. The Cole parents are kind of terrible in the parents-using-their-kids-as-Instagram-moneymakers vein, and there’s a lot of (fair) criticism of online culture in the book. It does get a little wonky plot-wise, especially with the haunted house bits, and several things (including — warning! — violence toward adorable household pets) are predictable stalker-angry ghost tropes. (Even the ending is kind of obvious if you’ve read many books in this genre.) Still, it’s a fun, fast YA thriller, and I enjoyed it.

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The Glare by Margot Harrison

The Glare is all the warnings about screen time rolled into one otherworldly drama: Hedda has been living off the grid with her mom for a decade, ever since a childhood incident convinced her parents that computers made her “off-kilter.” Hedda can’t remember anything about what happened, but she’s grown up protected from “the glare” of computer screens. Now, though, Hedda’s headed back to the real world to live with her computer game designer dad and his new family, and technology is everywhere. Practically her first night in the real world, she ends up playing an oddly familiar first-person shooter game on the dark web, and memories of the past slowly start to return. The game, it turns out, is part of an urban legend: Die 13 times on level 13, and you’ll die in the real world. It seems ridiculous — until gamers start dying around her, and Hedda’s cell phone starts receiving threatening messages. Is her mom right that technology is making her a little crazy? Or is something even more sinister going on?

It’s a cool idea, and I found the first half of the book, setting all of this up, fairly interesting, but then it seems to skid off the rails a bit. It starts out all Black Mirror-ish, critiquing technology even as it embraces its possibilities, but that’s not where it ends up — which is fine, but the transition feels clumsy and unfinished. And while the idea that the darkness inside us is the real villain is always interesting, it’s kind of undermined by the fact that there is an actual villain, lurking in the shadows, doing villain-y stuff for ill-explained reasons. Still, some of the early scenes with the game bleeding into the real world are deliciously creepy, so if that’s your thing, you should totally pick this one up.

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The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky

OK, so one of my YA literature pet peeves is when it turns out that everything in the story has always been about the heroine, and that means there is no way I was not going to be annoyed by The Mary Shelley Club. Which is a shame, because I loved the title and the idea of a secret teen club dedicated to pulling off terrifying pranks.

Rachel’s the new kid at Manchester Prep, and all she really wants is a fresh start after a traumatic event made her notorious in her old town. Manchester Prep is full of entitled kids whose allowances are bigger than her family’s rent, but Rachel quickly becomes part of a secret club dedicated to fear — specifically, each member has to scare a scream out of a chosen target. But Rachel can’t help feeling like there’s something going on she doesn’t know about, and it may be a lot more than a prank in the planning.

The book starts off strong and builds to a shivery middle, but the end collapses a bit into melodrama and the aforementioned need to make everything ultimately about the heroine. Worth reading? Sure, if it sounds like your thing, but it’s not my favorite. Mary Shelley deserves better.

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The Murder Game by Carrie Doyle

In The Murder Game, Luke’s bad boy roommate Oscar is the prime suspect in their teacher’s murder, and no one seems interested in proving his innocence but Luke. The title (and cover) may make you think there’s more than one murder in store for you or some kind of game, but nope, it’s kind of a typical boarding school teen murder mystery. There’s a cast of suspects (the teacher’s husband, who also happens to be the dean; the dean’s ex-wife; the teacher’s ex-husband; etc.), and a loner girl with a secret past who teams up with Luke to solve the murder. The adults feel like caricatures (though I suspect teens often see adults that way), and the students aren’t super well-developed. Luke, for instance, has a crazy backstory, in which he was apparently held captive in the woods but escaped using his survival skills, but even though that seems more interesting than the actual murder mystery plot, that backstory is never really developed. And, really, failing to get into this story kind of meant that Luke was a pretty static character — we can’t see him grow if we don’t know who he is.

This sounds critical, but every book doesn’t have to be a classic. If you’re in the mood for a fast, fun YA mystery, this one might just fit the bill.

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You Owe Me a Murder by Eileen Cook

The thing about rewriting a Hitchcock classic thriller is that you really need something to set your story apart from the original — to make it feel like you’ve made the story your own. Sadly, You Owe Me a Murder doesn’t manage this, and it ends up feeling like a watered-down YA version of Strangers on a Train.

When freshly dumped Kim meets Nicki, a stranger on a plane, she’s ready to murder her ex, who not only broke her heart but also managed to break it just in time for Kim to be stuck on a class trip to London with him and his new girlfriend. Nicki’s got her own problems with her mom, and when she suggests they swap murders, Strangers on a Train style, Kim laughs it off — until her ex-boyfriend turns up dead, and Nicki starts blackmailing Kim to hold up her end of the bargain.

Kim is an unreliable — and increasingly unlikable — protagonist, and I do like that she’s not just a Good Girl in a Bad Situation. The book is definitely fast-paced — which is handy, since we all already know the major plot beats. But I did not like the gratuitous love interest, I did not like the sheer predictability of the story, and I especially did not like the resolution, which fell flat after all the tension-building. Maybe I would have liked it more if I hadn’t watched the movie (and read the book on which it was based) so many times? But this one fell pretty flat for me.

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Five Total Strangers by Natalie D. Richards

Five Total Strangers is obviously about a group of people who turn out NOT to be total strangers, and while I am down for a Hitchcockian thriller, this one relied a little too heavily on coincidence to keep me engaged. Mira’s on her way from her fancy California art high school back home to her mom, who’s still a bit of wreck a year after her twin sister — Mira’s aunt — died from cancer. Mira’s not doing so great either — and she’d probably be doing even worse if she knew that she’d been being stalked for the past year. Lucky (??) for her, she doesn’t know because her stalker has been sending mail to the wrong address — but that’s okay, because Mira’s stalker is on her flight, and when the airport shuts down during a snowstorm, Mira’s stalker is one of the FIVE TOTAL STRANGERS who agree to rent a car and drive together. I mean, OK, Mira’s stalker is biding their time, and this opportunity just kind of presents itself, but this seems like an increasingly big reach as the squad of teens gets into a series of snow-related accidents, gets chased down by an angry convenience store owner with a gun, and keeps running into the same creepy hitchhiker wherever they stop. Because Mira has no idea she’s being stalked, the big reveal is basically her discovering a stack of letters addressed to her in the trunk of the car, freaking out, and immediately getting into a cliffside shove-off with her stalker. It’s pretty unsatisfying, especially since the letters from her stalker are sprinkled throughout, hinting at a more nuanced resolution. If you can get over the more and more unlikely incidents and just relax into the drama, this is an entertaining soap opera-y stalker story (but with none of the psychic dread of actually being stalked), but it broke my willing suspension of disbelief pretty early and never got it back.

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I Hope You’re Listening by Tom Ryan

When she was seven, Dee went into the woods with her best friend Sibby. Sibby never came back — Dee watched her abduction and told the police everything she could, but Sibby was gone.

A decade later, Dee is still haunted by the loss of her childhood friend and obsessed with missing persons cases — so much so that she’s become the (heavily disguised) voice behind the popular Radio Silent true crime podcast. Dee and her team of internet detectives have even racked up an impressive record of solved cases — bringing the podcast to the attention of mass media, which Dee definitely doesn’t want. Meanwhile, another little girl goes missing from Dee’s family’s old house, and Dee can’t helping making the connection to Sibby’s disappearance all those years ago. Could this be her chance to finally find out what really happened to her best friend?

I enjoyed I Hope You’re Listening, which was fast-paced, engaging, and peopled with likable characters. The plot got away from itself here and there and it felt over-written in places — have editors just stopped actually editing books? Is that not a thing anymore? — but I liked Dee enough to stick with her, and I’m glad I did. So much of what happens to us as kids and teenagers shapes who we become and the ways we choose to live, and I loved watching Dee realize that, accept it, and counter it on her own terms. Not all of us deal with being the spare kid in an abduction scenario, obviously, but we’re all tangled in our own history, often in ways we don’t realize. I think the book did a nice job of illuminating that. And, of course, I loved the Radio Silent community — there’s a part at the end where they play kind of a big role, and I’m not going to lie, I got a little weepy thinking about the way that strangers can be friends thanks to the connections we forge on the internet.

So a solid read for me, even with some sloppy storytelling. I’d recommend it for your YA reader obsessed with true crime.

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