The Best Thriller & Mystery Picks From Oprah's Book Club

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

There are many ways to measure the cultural influence of Oprah Winfrey, but few are as seismic as her book club. First launched in 1996, Oprah's Book Club has, for nearly three decades (save for a short hiatus in 2010), demonstrated that literary taste and mass appeal need not be mutually exclusive. The publishing industry learned quickly that a single endorsement from Oprah could catapult an obscure novel to instant best-sellerdom. The phenomenon became so familiar it earned its own name: the Oprah Effect.

In the years since, the landscape has filled with celebrity-led book clubs. Reese Witherspoon curates contemporary women's fiction with an eye towards adaptation. Natalia Portman's book club selections tend toward the literary and the political. Jenna Bush Hager's Read With Jenna has become a steady tastemaker. But it was Oprah who turned the solitary act of reading into a national conversation. She walked so the rest could run.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about her picks, though, is their range — you truly never know what kind of story you're going to get. One month, it's a historical epic; the next, a spare, elliptical memoir; the next, a literary novel. But, occasionally and deliciously, there comes a thriller or mystery, taut and clever. These suspense-laced selections are few and far between in the Oprah canon, but they hold their own against the media magnate's many popular picks.

Elizabeth Strout won a Pulitzer Prize for her devastating portraits of small-town life, but "Tell Me Everything" might be her most surprising turn yet. It's recognizably Strout in mood and style — sparse, raw, humane, and wry in places. But lurking in between the lines is something unexpected: a murder.

This time, the familiar town of Crosby, Maine, is shadowed by the case of Gloria Beach, an elderly woman whose body is found in a quarry pool. Her strange and subdued son is suspected of the crime, and Bob Burgess — a lawyer we've met before in the Strout universe — is caught in the middle of the investigation. This whodunnit drifts into the narrative, folding itself into the routines and fragmentary memories of the rural everyday.

Lucy and Olive return from Strout's earlier novels ("My Name is Lucy Barton" and "Olive Kitteridge,"). Their friendship forms the heart of the novel, and longtime Stroutians will recognize them immediately. For all its restraint, "Tell Me Everything" simmers with the undercurrent of suspicion, and the ever-present question of who we really are.

Jacquelyn Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean" was Oprah's very first Book Club pick, back in 1996. It was clear, then, that Oprah had a taste for emotionally charged, high-stakes literature. It begins with a mother's horror, as she turns around in a busy hotel lobby and realizes her 3-year-old son is gone. For nine years, there is no sign of Ben. Then, one day, there is. He is safe, alive, and living just down the street.

But this isn't the neat reunion the Cappadora family dreamed of. Ben has no recollection of them. He knows another father, another life. To him, this reunion feels more like the abduction, not the homecoming. As the family tries to welcome him back, all the pain they've buried begins to surface. Not every wound can heal cleanly, and Mitchard confronts readers with the sensitive question, what defines a family, really?

Not a conventional thriller, "The Road," by Cormac McCarthy, is a work of dystopian fiction that teases its readers with core tropes of the genre. In a bleak, post-apocalyptic America, civilization has buckled, so a father and son make their way south. The world is savage and scorched, and as they scavenge for food and shelter, danger threatens in every encounter. But even as survival becomes more difficult by the day, the bond between father and son remains a flicker of light in the darkness.

McCarthy, famously private and every bit the reclusive writer, surprised many by agreeing to a rare interview with Oprah after she selected "The Road" for her Book Club in 2007. Reflecting on her unexpected choice, the talk show titan said (via CBS), "It's unlike anything I've ever chosen as a book club selection before because it's post-apocalyptic. It is very unusual for me to select this book, but it's fascinating."

Like so many good thrillers, the setting of Christina Schwarz's bestselling "Drowning Ruth" is an eerie, remote one. It's 1919, on a Wisconsin island in the dead of winter. Amanda has always lived in the shadow of her sister Mathilda, who is prettier, more outgoing, and now married with a child, Ruth. Amanda returns home from her nursing job when Mathilda's husband leaves for war, and the sisters move into their family farmhouse with young Ruth. But this domestic novel quickly slips into something stranger and more shadowed. 

Amanda, recovering from illness and burdened by duty and guilt, sees herself as Ruth's protector — even her surrogate mother. But when Amanda's own buried past threatens to resurface in the shape of a newborn child, a terrible decision is made on thin ice. Sisterhood is tested by sacrifice, secrets, obsession, and motherhood both claimed and taken. It's no surprise this haunting story earned a spot on Oprah's Book Club in 2000.

Chris Bohjalian's 1997 novel "Midwives" was chosen for Oprah's Book Club the following year. This disconcerting thriller opens in the stillness of a Vermont winter, where a seasoned midwife finds herself alone in a farmhouse, the snow piling high outside and no help on the way. Sibyl Danforth has delivered hundreds of babies, but that night, something goes horribly wrong. Believing the laboring mother has died of a stroke, she makes a split-second decision to save the child. The baby lives, but the mother might not have been dead when the first incision was made.

Sybil now faces scrutiny from the justice system, the medical establishment, and her own conscience. Told through the eyes of Sybil's now-grown daughter, 14 at the time, and now an obstetrician herself, "Midwives" spirals between memory and the courtroom. Readers, be warned, there are no easy verdicts here.

Oprah's Book Club isn't known for churning out thrillers or mysteries exclusively. But when she does select one, it tends to pack a punch. This list pulls from both iterations of her club, with stories that build suspense and tension though propulsive plots and clever writing. If you've found yourself drawn to the thrillers and mysteries of Reese's Book Club, or similar page-turning picks from Read With Jenna, these Oprah-approved choices might scratch the same itch.