20 Great Books to Read Over the Holidays 2025

“Suspense is an artform,” said Bruce Holsinger, the author of “Culpability,” a tense family drama about the ramifications of a horrific car accident. Oh, yes, I should add: The mini-van was driving itself.

“I think a lot about suspense—at the level of the chapter, the sentence, the sequence of chapters,” said Holsinger, an author of four previous novels. “I like a sense of momentum, so that the characters are kind of caught in this gerbil wheel, and they can’t get out.” Then he said: “And I have no hesitation in writing to contemporary attention spans. My own is much worse than it was.”

Holsinger’s tale is an anxious one—just one of several thrillers you’ll find within the stack of books on our annual list of what to read over the holidays. (“You know that Jonathan Haidt book ‘The Anxious Generation?’ I think we’re the anxious generations,” he said, emphasizing the plural.) And while “Culpability” begins with a bang, it keeps right on motoring ahead as father Noah, a small-time attorney, mother Lorelei, a high-powered AI ethicist, and their three children seek recuperation at a vacation home; as it happens, a mysterious tech billionaire owns a neighboring property. Quickly, it becomes apparent that nothing is as it seems nor is anything especially straightforward—least of all who bears ultimate responsibility for all that befalls them.