Cozy Winter Books: 9 Dark Thrillers to Read Under a Blanket

Did you know reading in bed might help you sleep better? In a study that ran in December 2019, people read a book in bed for 15 to 30 minutes a night for a week. More than four in ten of them said their sleep improved, compared to fewer than three in ten of the people who didn’t read before bed.

So a book before bed is already good for you. In winter, the best one is a book where the characters are stuck inside too (snowed in at a lodge or cut off by a storm) with a killer somewhere in the building. Their night is so much worse than yours that your couch and your blanket suddenly feel AMAZING. Here are the cozy winter books that make you glad you’re not going back outside:

The Short Version

• If you want a storm, a serial killer and the one cop nobody believes, read The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest.
• If you want old friends snowed in at a Highland lodge over New Year, read The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley.
• If you want the scariest winter on this list, read The Shining by Stephen King.
• If you want to laugh at a murder in the snow, read Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson.

How I Picked These Books

I write thrillers set on Fire Island. That’s why I love books where the weather traps everybody. My criteria for the cozy winter books on this list:

1. You forget how cold it is: the world in the book is so vivid that you stop noticing the draft under the door.
2. Nobody can leave: a blizzard, an avalanche or a hurricane cuts everyone off, so the characters are stuck with whoever the killer is.
3. You can’t put it down: every chapter ends with a reason to start the next one. It’s dark at five o’clock anyway, so you might as well stay up finding out who did it!

At a Glance

What Are the Best Cozy Winter Books?

1. The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest (2026)

Read this if: you want a detective who grew up reading the island’s storms, and a killer who uses them.

What you’re getting: a Fire Island crime thriller told in first person by Violet Crisp. When she was sixteen, she saw a man murdered on the beach the night her best friend drowned, and nobody believed her. She’s twenty-six now, a police officer on the island she grew up on, living on her boat with her cat, Purrmaid, and a corkboard full of dead people. A new chief is finally listening, and another storm is coming. The killer in The Storm Reaper built his method around the Gray Man, a real Atlantic-coast legend in which a ghost appears before hurricanes to warn people to leave: see him and leave, you live; stay, you die in the storm.

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: I grew up laying fence on the dunes with the rest of my community on Fire Island before every hurricane season. That’s where Violet in The Storm Reaper comes from. She watches the tides and the birds the way everyone else watches the forecast, and she’s the only person in town who thinks the storm deaths aren’t accidents.

What readers say:

“The storm setting, the isolation, and the hunt for a murderer who uses nature as cover make this a gripping, original read, and I loved every bit of it.” — Sarah, Goodreads Reviewer

“Absolutely amazing read. Could not put the story down once I started it.” — Hannah Rhoades, Goodreads Reviewer

“I have not read such a thrilling murder mystery in a long time.” — Robyn Reads, Goodreads Reviewer

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2. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (2019)

Read this if: your favorite part of New Year’s Eve is watching which friends are secretly fighting.

What you’re getting: the Morrow hardcover is told in flashbacks from several different characters’ points of view. A group of old friends goes to Loch Corrin, a remote estate in the Scottish Highlands, for New Year. A blizzard “will soon cut off the 50,000-acre spread from the outside world,” and then one of them disappears. By January 2, the estate’s manager hears that a guest’s body has been found.

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: Publishers Weekly said it “makes for a cracklingly suspenseful story for a long winter’s night,” which is exactly what I was looking for with this list! Every narrator is one of the old friends, so the heads you’re inside are the same people you shouldn’t trust. It was a Sunday Times No.1 bestseller in the UK.

Fair warning: there’s “mention of a serial killer on the loose in the Highlands,” so keep the lights on when someone goes out to the woods.

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3. The Shining by Stephen King (1977)

Read this if: you want the most famous snowed-in book ever written and you don’t scare easily.

What you’re getting: the Doubleday hardcover first came out in January 1977. Jack Torrance takes the off-season caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel and brings his family, including his five-year-old son, Danny. The Overlook is “a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter,” and it has “a gruesome past.”

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: A family snowed in at a mountain hotel all winter sounds like the coziest setup in the world (until you remember Stephen King wrote it). Then “strange and terrible forces gather around the Overlook,” and Danny is “the only one to notice.” Kirkus called it “[b]ack-prickling.” It was a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Fair warning: Jack has “a history of violence,” and his family is snowed in with him.

Read Now →

4. One by One by Ruth Ware (2020)

Read this if: you’ve ever been on a work retreat and wanted to push a coworker off a mountain.

What you’re getting: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster published it in alternating chapters from Liz and Erin. Eight coworkers from Snoop, a “devastatingly successful” streaming app, go to a remote French ski chalet together (a work trip, so you already know someone’s getting murdered). Then “there’s an avalanche, and the chalet is cut off from contact with the outside world.”

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: Kirkus said Ware “offers up her version of And Then There Were None,” except the island is a ski chalet built for “a little powder, a little pampering.” One by One was a New York Times bestseller and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2020.

Fair warning: Kirkus called the solution “maddeningly simple,” so if you guess it, you’re not alone.

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5. The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse (2021)

Read this if: you like a detective who’s supposed to be on leave and gets dragged back in anyway.

What you’re getting: a debut from Pamela Dorman/Viking. Elin Warner is a detective on time off when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at Le Sommet, a five-star hotel built in a former sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps. She arrives “in the midst of a threatening storm,” and the next morning Laure is missing, with the storm “closing off all access to the hotel.”

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: Publishers Weekly said Pearse’s debut “boasts a highly atmospheric setting.” The Sanatorium was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick.

Fair warning: Kirkus called it “overloaded, grisly, and ultimately silly,” so this is the one for when you want atmosphere more than logic.

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6. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (2022)

Read this if: you’re about to spend a long weekend with your own family.

What you’re getting: the Mariner hardcover is narrated by an author named Ernest Cunningham. A storm strands the Cunningham family reunion at a mountain resort, and then “they find the first body in the snow.”

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: Publishers Weekly called it an “exceptionally clever and amusing mystery,” and Ernie tells you up front that narrators like him are supposed to be unreliable. It’s the only comedy on this list, so this is the one where you’re allowed to laugh at the body in the snow. It’s being adapted into a major television series.

Fair warning: Kirkus said “[t]his book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.”

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7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (2008)

Read this if: you want a cold case and a long book to go with your long nights.

What you’re getting: the Knopf hardcover, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland. Harriet Vanger vanished from her family’s remote island retreat north of Stockholm more than forty years ago. Her uncle hires Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist fresh off a libel conviction, and he’s helped by Lisbeth Salander, a “pierced and tattooed punk prodigy.”

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: there are three storylines and, as Kirkus put it, “an inordinately long setup,” so this is the one to start when you have a lot of nights ahead of you. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a #1 national bestseller.

Fair warning: it has rape, incest, torture and serial killings in it, which makes it the hardest read here.

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8. Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg (1992)

Read this if: you want a heroine who knows more about snow than anyone else in the room.

What you’re getting: this was the Danish novelist’s first novel to appear in English, translated by Tiina Nunnally. Young Isaiah Christiansen falls from a snow-covered roof in Copenhagen, and Smilla can’t let go of his lone rooftop tracks, or the fact that he was afraid of heights. Her search ends up on the Kronos, a smuggling ship bound for Greenland.

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: Smilla tells this one herself, and Publishers Weekly called her “caustic, caring, thoughtful, impulsive, determined and above all, rebellious,” which is a lot of adjectives for one heroine (and only some of them are nice). PW also called Smilla’s Sense of Snow “[a] dark, taut, compelling story.”

Fair warning: Publishers Weekly calls it a “quiet, absorbing suspense novel,” so this isn’t the one for jump scares.

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9. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane (2003)

Read this if: you want an island cut off by a storm and an ending you’ll want to talk about.

What you’re getting: the Morrow hardcover, set in 1954. There’s “a hurricane approaching the Massachusetts coast” when U.S. Marshals Edward Daniels and Charles Aule arrive at Ashecliffe Hospital. They’re there to find Rachel Solando, a patient who has disappeared from the island’s hospital for the criminally insane.

Why cozy-winter readers will like it: The storm here is a hurricane instead of a blizzard, and it strands the two marshals on the island the same way the snow strands Jack Torrance at the Overlook. Publishers Weekly said the ending “will go down as one of the most aesthetically right resolutions ever written,” and Kirkus called Shutter Island a “lollapalooza of a corkscrew thriller.”

Fair warning: the ending changes how you read everything before it.

Read Now →

Which One to Read Tonight

• You want the storm and the serial killer: The Storm Reaper, the only one here where the detective grew up on the island the storm is coming for.
• You want a whodunit with friends you’d never go on vacation with: The Hunting Party.
• You want to laugh before bed: Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.

If you want more of these after the nine, I keep lists of isolated thriller books, island thriller books and cold case thriller books.

FAQ: Cozy Winter Books

What Are Cozy Winter Books?

Cozy winter books are the ones you read inside on long, dark nights between December and February. On this list they’re dark thrillers instead of cozy mysteries, like The Hunting Party, which Publishers Weekly called “a cracklingly suspenseful story for a long winter’s night.”

What Should Be on a Winter Reading List for Thriller Fans?

The Shining is snowbound at the Overlook, and One by One has an avalanche that cuts a French ski chalet “off from contact with the outside world.” If you want the weather to be part of the crime, The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest is a better pick than either of those, because its killer uses hurricanes to cover up the murders. Goodreads reviewer Robyn Reads called it “A dark, twisted thriller combining the dangers of storms and the danger of someone moving and disguising themselves under the storms.”

What Are Good Winter Books to Read If You Don’t Like Cozy Mysteries?

The best winter books to read if cozy mysteries aren’t your thing are the ones with a real body count. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the darkest here, and Smilla’s Sense of Snow starts with a boy’s fall from a snow-covered Copenhagen roof, and the boy “had a fear of heights.”

What Are the Best Books to Read in December?

The best books to read in December are the ones set over the holidays themselves. The Hunting Party takes place over New Year at a Highland estate, and the body turns up on January 2.

What Are Good Books to Read Over the Holidays?

Good books to read over the holidays include at least one family reunion worse than yours. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is set at a family reunion at an Australian ski resort where a storm strands everyone, and Publishers Weekly called it “exceptionally clever and amusing.”

Is It Better to Read a Paper Book or an E-Reader in Bed?

A paper book is better in bed. In a Brigham and Women’s Hospital study, people who read on a light-emitting e-reader before bed took longer to fall asleep and made less melatonin than when they read a printed book.

Which Winter Reads on This List Are the Scariest?

The scariest winter reads on this list are The Shining and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Kirkus called King’s Overlook “[b]ack-prickling,” and its review of Larsson lists “[r]ape, incest, torture and serial killings.”

What Is The Storm Reaper About?

The Storm Reaper is a Fire Island crime thriller about Violet Crisp, a police officer who saw a murder at sixteen and has spent ten years proving a serial killer uses hurricanes as cover. Goodreads reviewer Calley wrote, “This was a fresh breathe of air!”

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