Thriller Reads🎢

Action-packed book recommendations for your winter travels.

Tale 🛩️

I’m writing this dispatch from an eerily-empty airport lounge. It’s before dawn, and the distant city—which I can glimpse from the diamond-shaped lounge windows—is cloaked in darkness. I have several hours before my next flight, and I’m struggling mightily to stay awake. By the end of my travels, my circadian clock will almost certainly have gone haywire.

I always find myself traveling in the winter, and staying awake while timezone hopping is a perennial challenge. Consequently, I have an annual tradition to stockpile and read the most exciting thrillers every December. These action-packed books keep me awake and alert on long layovers and flights. They’re also immensely fun to read!

Tomes 📚

Here are my thriller recommendations for December 2025.

Orphan X

This is one of my favorite thriller series. Evan Smoak is Orphan X, a former black ops assassin. Since leaving the top-secret Orphan program, Evan no longer conducts geopolitical missions—instead he offers his services pro bono to ordinary people who are in trouble.

The first book in the series introduces us to Evan, his personal commandments, and his minimalist penthouse apartment. The scenes in which Evan navigates the social intricacies of living in the fictional Castle Heights condominium in Los Angeles—while keeping his cover intact—are some of the funniest and most poignant. But the book also offers endless thrills and twists as Evan’s past catches up with him: Evan finds himself helping a gambling-debt victim while evading two Orphans sent to kill him. It’s a gripping read.

The Kidd Series

I first stumbled across this series in college, and I was immediately drawn to the hacker protagonist Kidd, who lives in the Twin Cities. In addition to being a cybersecurity wizard, Kidd is a talented painter. He juggles his two passions in a pragmatic manner: The programming jobs—usually borderline legal—pay the bills and buy him adequate leisure time to spend painting. Kidd also has one final eccentricity: He dabbles in tarot. All the book titles in the series include tarot references. Some of the old book covers even include illustrations of tarot cards.

In the first book of the series, Kidd agrees to a highly illegal corporate sabotage job—one that is extremely lucrative. He enlists the help of his hacker acquaintance, his journalist friend, and his cat burglar girlfriend. But soon Kidd and his crew find themselves in more danger than they bargained for. It’s a fun page-turner—even if it’s a bit dated.

The series is a short one with only 4 books. Much to my chagrin, the Kidd series was abandoned by John Sanford in favor of his more commercially successful Prey series. However, Kidd does have some cameos in the author’s other series—and I always look forward to those tidbits about him.

The It Girl

This is a standalone thriller and murder mystery that I blazed through in a few days. The story revolves around a group of six friends who met at Oxford University. Many years after their graduation, the friends are still haunted by the tragic death of their charismatic friend April. The story unfolds in two timelines—the friends’ college days and their present days—as Hannah, April’s best friend, tries to piece together the past based on new evidence. This harrowing story—full of red herrings, drama, and danger—will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.