Best Audiobooks of 2023 in Mystery and Suspense
Last updated: January 09, 2025
There are few experiences more fun than listening to a great mystery or crime novel or thriller as an audiobook. Of the thousands published every year, which ones are worth listening to? Fortunately, there's a website that helps sift through them for you. Editors at AudioFile magazine have been listening to books in audio since the early 1990s and are at the top of their game. Here's their list of the best audiobooks of 2023 in mystery and suspense and our list of best mystery audiobooks for 2024.
Birnam Wood: A Novel
by Eleanor Catton & Saskia Maarleveld (narrator)
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023
“Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for her novel, The Luminaries. This is very different. It’s also set in her native New Zealand, but it’s a kind of environmentalist thriller. It’s extremely witty, extremely pacey, and incredibly well crafted. It’s about the fight over a particular patch of threatened ground in rural New Zealand. A group of guerrilla gardeners wants to use it for their organic ecological project but it’s also in the sights of miners and developers. The clash between them is executed with incredible panache, wit, surprise and suspense.
This is a book which on its back cover has an endorsement from none other than Stephen King, which I think tells you about the narrative drive that Eleanor Catton achieves here. It’s enormously enjoyable and, of course, it raises all of these profound questions about who should control the land and how it can be protected from environmental degradation.”
“One of the biggest books of the season must be Eleanor Catton’s hotly anticipated third novel Birnam Wood. Pitched (somewhat unexpectedly) as a psychological thriller, it follows the members of a guerilla gardening group as they take over an abandoned farm in cautious partnership with a paranoid American billionaire with plans to build his own survivalist bunker.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
All the Sinners Bleed
by S.A. Cosby
☆ Shortlisted for the 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Awards
🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023
All the Sinners Bleed (2023) is the latest book by S.A. Cosby, a writer of crime novels set in the Southern United States. In this book, thankfully, the main character is on the right side of the law: he's a former FBI agent, now a sheriff in Virginia. The plot revolves around unspeakable crimes and a serial killer, with all the anguish of race relations at the forefront as the action unfolds.
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
by Jesse Q. Sutanto and narrated by Eunice Wong
☆ Shortlisted for the 2024 CWA Gold Dagger
🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023
“This is about a very fun character. She’s called Vera Wong and she runs Vera Wang’s Tea House in San Francisco. That’s on purpose: she wants to ghost off the name Vera Wang—but her teahouse is not very successful. She comes down one morning and there is a dead body. She sets out to figure out who the murderer is. She works through four different suspects—you’ve got the journalists, the brother of the dead man, his widow—and she gets to know each of them. She’s really trying to figure out who did it by inserting herself in their lives, which is a unique way to approach solving a mystery.” Read more...
Best Audiobooks of 2023 (so far)
Michele Cobb, Publisher
The Secret Hours
by Mick Herron
☆ Shortlisted for the 2024 CWA Gold Dagger
🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023
A standalone spy thriller from the author of the wildly popular Slough House series. Mick Herron is a great writer who enjoys portraying not glamorous secret agents but dysfunctional human beings. He is also a lovely man and a big supporter of local libraries.
I Have Some Questions for You
by Rebecca Makkai and narrated by Julia Whelan and JD Jackson
🏆 An AudioFile Best Fiction Audiobook of 2023
“This one was fun for me because I love a good mystery, but it also has a true crime podcast focus. It’s about a woman who is a podcaster. She went to high school in New Hampshire—a made-up boarding school—and she returns to teach some classes. It turns out a student had been murdered while she was there and someone who worked at the college was convicted of the murder. Now as a teacher, with her students, she reinvestigates, ‘What actually happened to her classmate? What happened to the person who was ultimately convicted of her murder?’ It was an intriguing listen. The main character’s life is a mess. Her husband is going through a scandal. You’ve got the layers of the mystery, her personal life and her returning to a place where she didn’t have the best experience.” Read more...
Best Audiobooks of 2023 (so far)
Michele Cobb, Publisher
Rogue Justice
by Adenrele Ojo (narrator) & Stacey Abrams
🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023
Rogue Justice by Stacey Adams is the second legal thriller featuring U.S. Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene. The first book in the series, a New York Times bestseller, is While Justice Sleeps.
Dead Man's Pose
by John Roosen & Susan Rogers & Rupert Degas (narrator)
🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023
Dead Man's Pose is a murder mystery set in a yoga studio in Sydney Australia, the first book in a series of 'Yoga Mat Mysteries.'
