Podcasts have become an integral part of our everyday life. We listen to them while doing chores and carrying out errands, while driving or taking public transportation, and sometimes (though this is mostly dedicated to our very favorite podcasts) we simply sit and enjoy them without doing anything else. There’s even a couple of amazing television shows where podcasts are featured prominently like Only Murders in the Building (Hulu) and Bodkin (Netflix).
In 2025, 10% of all podcasts listened to worldwide were true crime podcasts. We’re willing to bet most of the people who listen to true crime podcasts would also be fans of murder mystery and thriller novels. So, why not read books that combine both?
Here’s a selection of murder mystery and thriller novels where podcasts, and podcasters, are central to the narrative.
If I Disappear by Eliza Jane Brazier
When Sera’s favorite true-crime podcast host, Rachel, goes missing, she plunges headfirst into the wild backcountry of Northern California and her own dangerous obsession. Rachel is not the first woman to vanish, and she won’t be the last.
The Sorority Murder by Allison Brennan
Lucas Vega is obsessed with the murder of Candace Swain. While interning at the medical examiner’s, he discovers new information, creates a podcast to revisit Candace’s last hours, and teams up with a former U.S. marshal who not only exposes Candace’s secret life but also Lucas’.
The Other Side of Disappearing by Kate Clayborn
Jess and her sister, along with a prying podcast host and a watchful, handsome podcast producer, set off on a search for their mother, who ran away with an accomplished con man years earlier and hope to unravel the mystery of where the couple disappeared to and why.
The Night Swim by Megan Goldin
Popular true-crime podcaster Rachel Krall finds an unsettling note on her windshield begging for help before she uncovers dark community secrets from the past and present, including one involving the disappearance of her own sister.
Night Will Find You by Julia Heaberlin
Vivvy Bouchet was ten when she saved a boy’s life by making an impossible prediction. Now she’s an astrophysicist in Texas, devoted to science, but the boy she saved has become a cop and continues to believe she can see things no one else can. When Vivvy becomes the target of a conspiracy theorist podcaster, she fights back with both her scientific mind and her inexplicable gifts.
None of This is True by Lisa Jewell
Popular podcaster Alix Summer becomes the subject of her own podcast after a woman named Josie Fair comes into her life and then disappears, leaving behind a terrible and terrifying legacy that puts her family’s lives in mortal danger.
Possession by Katie Lowe
A true-crime podcast reopens a 10-year-old murder case involving a skeptical police officer, a suspicious best friend, a convicted teen who swears he is innocent and a wife who does not remember anything.
I Know You Know by Gilly MacMillan
Haunted by the murders of his best friends 20 years earlier, filmmaker Cody Swift returns home and starts a podcast to record his findings. Cody soon find out there are many people who don’t want the case, along with old wounds, reopened to many years after the tragedy, especially Charlie’s mother, Jess, who decides to take matters into her own hands.