Top Thriller and Mystery Selections from Reese’s Book Club

In recent years, the so-called “dark academia” aesthetic has drawn in a generation yearning for the romanticism of scholarly pursuit. Picture Gothic architecture, candlelit libraries, and the brooding intellectualism of classical literature. But beneath the polished wood and Latin mottos, there invariably lies something far more unsettling. Lauren Ling Brown’s debut novel, “Society of Lies,” calls upon this very allure, beckoning readers into the hallowed halls of Princeton University, only to reveal the shadows that lurk there. 

The novel follows Maya Mason, a woman returning for her ten-year reunion to a past she thought she had mastered. Her younger sister, Naomi, poised to graduate, is found dead. An accident, they claim. But Naomi had become entangled in the Sterling Club, an exclusive society whose influence stretches back centuries. Maya sees the shape of the lie before her, but what she does not yet see is how deep it runs, or how much of herself is buried within it. 

Lauren Ling Brown is a Princeton alumna herself, and writes with the knowing hand of an insider. You’ll find yourself drawn into the ivy-clad walls of this taut and tempting thriller — an intriguing addition to the dark academia canon.

In 1985, Ana Mendieta — a Cuban artist known for her visceral and haunting work — died after falling from a 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village. Her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was charged with her murder but later acquitted, a verdict that left the art world divided. It is this true story that author Xochitl Gonzalez has used as the basis for her novel, “Anita de Monte Laughs Last.”  

Anita de Monte is a Cuban artist who marries Jack Martin. To the public, he is a celebrated sculptor and prominent figure in the wider art scene. But behind closed doors, de Monte gets something darker: a husband who is pathologically unfaithful, ruthlessly competitive, emotionally abusive, and all too quick to benefit from the power his whiteness and seniority afford him. 

In the end, she pays the ultimate price: Her life is cut short in a similarly violent fate to her real-life counterpart, Ana Mendieta. As Anita’s creative legacy is buried beneath her husband’s acclaim, her name fades into obscurity. That is, until years later, when a Dominican American art student at Brown stumbles upon her forgotten work. Determined to unearth the truth behind de Monte’s untimely death, she soon finds herself confronting her own place in a world that systemically erases women of color. 

This is a plucky read that is sure to rattle you. As a reckoning of the forces that bury female brilliance in the margins, it’s no wonder Reese Witherspoon picked it for her book club.

Whodunnit, or who-am-I? Denise Mina’s “Conviction” is a thriller wrapped in the unravelling of a constructed identity, beginning — fittingly — with a lie. The novel opens with its protagonist, Anna McDonald, listening to her favorite salve in podcast form: true crime. “Death and the Dana” is a welcome escape until a name from her buried past emerges from its scripted suspense. The case at hand — the mysterious sinking of a luxury yacht — isn’t just a distant fascination. Anna knew one of the victims. And the podcast’s version of events doesn’t add up. 

But Anna is no ordinary listener. She is not even, as it turns out, Anna. For years, she has hidden beneath a new identity, an erasure born of necessity. When her husband abruptly leaves her for her best friend, taking their daughters with him, she has nothing left to lose, and nowhere to go but deeper into the mystery. With Fin, a washed-up musician with problems of his own, she sets out on a transcontinental pursuit of the truth, from Scotland to Venice, dodging forces invested in keeping the past buried. 

Mina plays with genre in “Conviction.” It is a thriller that behaves like a road novel, and a crime story that questions crime storytelling. The work unravels at high-speed as a wry deconstruction of true crime’s uneasy fixation with victimhood and spectacle. You won’t want to miss out on this breakneck chase of a thriller. 

The only thing that could make a thriller more gripping is if it actually happened. That’s what makes “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean so harrowing. It boasts all the tropes and writing of a great crime novel, except the mystery is very much real. An otherwise unassuming morning in April 1986 saw a fire tear through the Los Angeles Public Library, burning for seven hours and destroying 400,000 books. It should have dominated the news cycles, but the world had its eyes on Chernobyl at the time, and the fire all but disappeared from the headlines.

What Susan Orlean finds is stranger than fiction. The suspected arsonist, Harry Peak, was an out-of-work actor with a penchant for lying. Did he set the fire? The evidence never quite lands in one place, but “The Library Book” treats the mystery not as a destination, but as a spark. 

With writing that is rapturously immediate and lusciously immersive, Orlean’s exacting prose moves like a detective retracing footprints, weaving the blaze into a larger story about the precariousness of knowledge. Reese Witherspoon called it “a love letter to libraries,” but it’s also a cautionary tale and a heartfelt reminder: The stories we think are safe can vanish in an instant if we don’t hold them close. “The Library Book” is one you’ll want to hold close.

We saw Reese Witherspoon herself step into the world of Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere,” bringing its slow-burning suburban unrest to the screen. With “Our Missing Hearts,” she’s throwing her weight behind Ng once more — this time, for a chilling dystopian tale of state control. Set in a near-future America that has legislated fear into policy, the horrors here are quiet, insidious. Books disappear from shelves and families fracture under government orders. 

12-year-old Bird Gardner is a child of a Chinese American poet whose work has been deemed unpatriotic. He knows not to ask questions, but when a cryptic letter arrives, he can’t help himself. His desperate search for his mother leads him through an underground network keeping censored stories alive. 

Ng is a writer of precision. Her stark prose is measured but urgent, and her moral vision is crystal. Unlike “Little Fires Everywhere,” which concerned itself with the hidden fractures of privilege, “Our Missing Hearts” asks what happens when the fractures aren’t hidden at all. As Reese herself described it, “This book is just sublime. It’s thought-provoking, heart-wrenching, and it just had me up all night” (via TikTok).  

Each of these books come with Reese Witherspoon’s seal of approval — handpicked for her ever-popular book club, and lauded for their gripping storytelling. While they all play with the hallmarks of the thriller and mystery genres, no two are alike. What unites them is their excellence: slick writing, immersive plots, high-stakes intrigue, and the kind of tension that keeps readers hooked. We have no doubt these thrilling mystery books will resonate with our readership, keeping them so utterly absorbed that the hours (and pages) will fly by.