Entertainment
10 Mystery Books You Need To Read Before Their TV Adaptations Premiere
Nothing beats getting to say you read it first, and lately Hollywood is making that easy. Streaming is snapping up mystery novels faster than bookstores can shelve them.
The mystery books below are all somewhere in the pipeline to your screen. A few are already filming with names attached, others have been freshly optioned by producers still playing coy about which streaming platform has bid how much for the rights. Do the reading now, and you’ll have earned the right to be smug about it later.
‘Count My Lies’ (2025)
Hulu is betting on a full Lindsay Lohan renaissance here, pairing her with Shailene Woodley as the dueling leads and slotting Kit Harington in as the husband caught between them. Running the show are Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, the pair behind This Is Us, and Sophia Bush, Katherine LaNasa, and Lou Diamond Phillips fill out the rest of the cast.
The book itself is a nervy little con. Sloane is a compulsive liar who tells one small fib to a man in a park and slowly threads her way into the lives of a glossy Manhattan couple, Violet and Jay Lockhart, whose marriage turns out to be keeping a few secrets of its own. Everything rides on how much you can trust Sloane as a narrator, and since a screen version has to rebuild that effect from the ground up, you’ll want her voice in your head before anyone else gets their hands on it.
‘The God of the Woods’ (2024)
It’s the summer of 1975, and a thirteen-year-old named Barbara Van Laar has vanished from her bunk at an exclusive Adirondacks camp. Worse, she’s the daughter of the family that owns the place, and her brother disappeared under eerily similar circumstances years before. Author Liz Moore weaves the campers, the counselors, the investigators, and the Van Laars themselves into one slowly tightening knot, until the real subject becomes how money decides which missing kids ever get a real search.
Netflix is well into this one. Moore is co-showrunning with The Post‘s Liz Hannah for Sony Pictures Television, and Maya Hawke leads as Judy Luptack, the region’s first woman investigator, backed by Kerry Condon, Tracy Letts, and John Gallagher Jr. Directors were locked in by the summer of 2026, even if the episode order still hasn’t been announced. Because Moore keeps folding her timeline back on itself, this is the kind of book you’ll be glad you mapped out for yourself before a series comes along to straighten it.
‘Darling Girls’ (2023)
Three foster sisters, Jessica, Norah, and Alicia, grew up together on an Australian farm under a foster mother, Miss Fairchild, whose warmth could turn to ice with no warning. Years later, a body surfaces beneath the old farmhouse and a detective calls, dragging the sisters back toward the childhood they’d spent decades trying to leave behind.
This one’s still early days, though Made Up Stories, the shop behind Big Little Lies, has optioned it. So the domestic-suspense pedigree is there, but nobody’s been cast and no network is attached. That long runway is actually the case for reading it now, because Hepworth’s real gift is making everyday family cruelty feel like a genuine horror story.
‘Lioness’ (2023)
If you’re after the literary pick of the group, this is it. Lioness took the 2024 Ockham, New Zealand’s top book prize, and it swaps the usual whodunit machinery for something slower and more unnerving. Therese has married into money and a powerful family, but once her property-developer husband gets tangled in corruption allegations, her polished life starts coming apart. Meanwhile, a free-spirited neighbor named Claire keeps nudging her toward a messier, more honest version of herself.
Made Up Stories snapped this up too, with The Mentalist‘s Simon Baker producing, though there’s no cast and no date. Nearly all of the novel’s charge is internal, living inside Therese’s quiet unraveling and her slow-building fury, so it’ll be interesting to see how a TV series translates that.
‘Here One Moment’ (2024)
On a delayed domestic flight, an ordinary-looking woman gets up from her seat and calmly tells each passenger how old they’ll be when they die, and what will kill them. Then her predictions start coming true, one after another, and a plane full of strangers who’ve taken to calling her the Death Lady are left to decide how much of their lives to reorganize around someone they’ll never see again.
The Big Little Lies gang is back together for this one, too: Nicole Kidman is attached along with Moriarty and producer Bruna Papandrea. Moriarty uses that one flight as a way into a dozen different experiences, and the novel hands you all of them in full. That’s the kind of sprawl a limited series will need to find a way to squeeze in.
‘The Husbands’ (2024)
Lauren comes home to her London flat and finds a husband she’s never laid eyes on. He wanders up into the attic, and a moment later, a different husband comes back down. As she gradually works out, the attic is quietly manufacturing an endless run of husbands, each one nudging her life into a slightly different direction. It’s a comedy with a sci-fi engine and real heartbreak humming underneath, all about the lives we never got around to choosing.
On the comedy side, this is the furthest along of the bunch. Apple TV has ordered eight episodes with A24. Ted Lasso‘s own Keeley Jones, Juno Temple, is set to star as Lauren. Succession writer Miriam Battye is adapting the novel, and Craig Gillespie is directing the UK shoot.
‘All We Ever Wanted’ (2018)
Start with the names attached, because they set the tone here. Netflix has Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben running this thing, and that pairing all but guarantees something glossy and full of twists. The rights came together in late 2025, so it’s still early days, with nobody cast. The novel is the oldest title here, from 2018, and maybe the one most primed to blow up a group chat.
In moneyed Nashville, a prep-school boy snaps a humiliating photo of a classmate at a party and passes it around. The fallout lands hard on his image-obsessed mother, Nina, and on the girl’s working-class single dad, Tom. Giffin keeps handing the narration around between the adults and the teenage girl at the center, and the loyalties get a lot murkier as readers venture deeper into the complicated class structure framing the driving mystery.
‘The One That Got Away with Murder’ (2024)
This is the list’s lone YA entry, and it’s a fast read. Lauren transfers to a new Pennsylvania town hoping for a clean slate and falls for Robbie Crestmont, whose ex-girlfriend is dead. So is his brother’s ex. The whole town has already decided the two siblings did it, but Lauren would rather dig up the truth on her own. That plan starts out looking brave and turns reckless in a hurry.
Hulu has it in development with Tawnya Bhattacharya and Ali Laventhol writing, and no cast so far. It’s a propulsive weekend read. The ingredients — its teen-noir bones, a small town where everyone’s already sure how the story ends, and a girl determined to prove them wrong — are the exact stuff streaming loves to spend money promoting in the queue.
‘The Midnight Feast’ (2024)
A wellness retreat called The Manor throws open its doors on the Dorset coast over the summer solstice, run by a serenity-peddling influencer whose land carries an ugly local history. Lucy Foley moves among a handful of narrators, circling an old friendship gone rotten and a current of folk-horror dread out past the treeline, until the final pages turn up a body nobody will claim.
Universal International Studios is developing it with producer Sue Naegle attached, and thanks to a Reese’s Book Club stamp, the audience is more or less already waiting. Foley builds these as precision whodunits with the point of view passing between potential killers, and half the fun is watching all the timelines click together yourself.
‘All the Sinners Bleed’ (2023)
Save the heavyweight for last. S. A. Cosby is the most decorated novelist on this list, and All the Sinners Bleed is peak S. A. Cosby. Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff of a small Virginia county, hunts a serial killer while the town’s buried racism keeps surfacing all around him. The plot is a bit pulpy, but nothing about the writing is. It’s also the most locked-in series of the group.
Netflix has ordered nine episodes with Black Panther‘s Joe Robert Cole showrunning. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù plays Titus and Nicole Beharie, Giancarlo Esposito, and Murray Bartlett round out the county around him. The show was filmed in Georgia with Hans Zimmer‘s team on the score. Of everything on this list, this is the one most likely to leave you open-mouthed by the end.
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