The 10 best thriller books to give this Christmas

Out of work and out of options, Julia Barlow moves into her family's 17th-century Massachusetts estate to care for her grandmother. Then the clocks stop, the lights flicker, and a voice tied to a 1692 witchcraft execution starts asking for help.

Give it to: The friend who reads McFadden in one sitting and wants a spooky winter read.

A struggling writer is hired to finish a bestselling author's series and finds an unpublished autobiography in the house that no one was ever supposed to read.

Give it to: Book club friends who love a twist they will argue about for weeks.

Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, 81, has outlived everyone on Kenny Lane and the suspicious deaths that followed her since childhood. When a nosy young neighbor decides they should be friends, the past starts coming back up.

Give it to: Grandparents, neighbors, and anyone who likes dark humor with their suspense.

A Paris honeymoon becomes a kidnapping in the French countryside, part of a wider pattern. As the FBI, CIA, and French intelligence close in, a young lawyer is recruited as bait.

Give it to: Dads, lawyers, and longtime Grisham fans who want something with a passport stamp.

Robert Langdon is back in Prague, chasing a vanished scientist and a manuscript about the nature of human consciousness through a city of codes, symbols, and secret history.

Give it to: The puzzle lover and the traveler who wants a page-turner for the flight.

A tradwife influencer wakes up in 1855 with none of the comforts her online life depended on, and has to survive while figuring out how she got there. Sharp satire wrapped around a real mystery.

Give it to: The friend who is chronically online and the one who rolls their eyes at it.

A man wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is, then slowly realizes he is humanity's last chance to stop something dimming the sun.

Give it to: Science nerds, teens, and anyone who thinks they do not like science fiction.

The final Talisman novel. An older Jack Sawyer has to stop a band of infected teens and a threat from beyond Mid-World before it unravels every world, ours included.

Give it to: The King completist and the reader who wants something big to disappear into over break.

Ten years after Big Little Lies, the kids are in high school, a threatening package lands on the principal's desk, and the Pirriwee mothers have to face the secrets they kept from their children.

Give it to: Anyone who binged the show and wants to know what happened next.