Books Set on Long Island: 9 Thrillers From the North Fork to the Hamptons

What I love most about Long Island is how many different kinds of people live on it. You’ve got the there-to-be-seen crowd in the Hamptons, dock workers, fishermen, farmers, tourists and families who have been there for generations. And they all share one long, skinny island, and most of them end up sitting in the same traffic on the Long Island Expressway, the highway that runs down the middle of it.

That’s why books set on Long Island are so fun. All of those worlds, neighborhoods and personalities run into each other, and the best books turn that into a story world you don’t forget. Here are the books set on Long Island that get it right, from the barrier islands out to the forks:

The Short Version

• For the barrier island in hurricane season, read The Storm Reaper: a Fire Island police officer is the only person who believes a serial killer is using the storms for cover. No cars, a ferry, and a storm closing the only way off.
• For the North Fork, read Plum Island: two government biologists are murdered, and an NYPD detective recovering at his uncle’s place in Southold gets pulled in to consult for the local police.
• When you want the Hamptons with the money on the page, read Magic Hour or The Guest: a movie producer shot beside his Southampton pool, and a twenty-two-year-old grifter who has to survive one week in the Hamptons after her older boyfriend throws her out.
• For the Long Island nobody puts on a tote bag, read Sunrise Highway: a trail of murdered women along Route 27 going back to 1977, and a Suffolk County police force that has been covering it up.

How I Picked These

Having grown up on Fire Island, here’s my criteria for a book that’s actually set on Long Island and not on one undifferentiated beach:

1. It has to be on a specific Long Island: Southold is not Southampton is not Massapequa. A book that could be moved to Cape Cod without changing a line doesn’t count, and you should be able to tell which exit it comes off.
2. So many different people, crammed onto one island: A fisherman and a hedge fund manager use the same harbor here, and the good books put them in the same scene. You should feel how different their lives are, and see what happens when those worlds run into each other.
3. Somebody has to live there in February: Summer people are a plot device; year-rounders are a community. If everyone in the book leaves in September, there’s nobody left to protect anyone, and the whole thing floats away.

At a Glance

Nine long island thriller books, and which Long Island each one is actually on.

Swipe sideways to see the whole table.

What Are the Best Books Set on Long Island?

Nine, in three groups by geography. One and two are the barrier islands off the south shore. Three to six are the South Fork, which is the Hamptons and the money. Seven to nine are the rest of it: the North Fork, the highway, and the family home where the old money lives. They’re grouped, not ranked.

Group one: the barrier islands. A strip of sand with no road down it, which makes the suspect pool a ferry schedule.

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

Read this if: If you want the part of Long Island that empties out after Labor Day and keeps going anyway. If you like a mystery where the storm setting and the isolation are the point.

What you’re getting: Fire Island, hurricane season: a claustrophobic, slow-burn crime thriller about the only police officer who believes a serial killer is using the storms for cover. Detective Violet Crisp reported a murder when she was sixteen and was told she imagined it. She has been the only one who believes it ever since.

Fire Island sits just off Long Island’s South Shore, and the case keeps pulling Violet onto the mainland, like the drive from Bay Shore to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office in Hauppauge. As the story goes on, there are hints of political corruption on the mainland seeping into what’s happening on the island.

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: Almost nobody writes the off-season version of Fire Island. The summer houses are shut, the boardwalks are empty, and the people who live there all year are still there with one ferry and a storm coming. Next to Bad Summer People, which is the same island in summer with the cottages full, this is the one where the island is a place somebody lives.

What readers say: “Van Nest’s descriptions made it feel like I was personally walking down the streets and beaches of Fire Island.” — Lisa Ellis, Goodreads Reviewer.

“Fire Island isn’t just a backdrop; it’s a living, breathing force.” — Estelle Bouldin, Goodreads Reviewer.

“A dark, twisted thriller combining the dangers of storms and the danger of someone moving and disguising themselves under the storms.” — Robyn Reads, Goodreads Reviewer.

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2. Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum (2023)

Read this if: it’s here because it’s the same strip of sand in the other season, when the cottages are full. You want the gossipy one.

What you’re getting: Kirkus gets there in its second sentence: “Welcome to Fire Island.” The same review describes how “narrow Fire Island sports a few towns full of heteronormative families with inherited cottages or gorgeous new builds.” There’s a body in the prologue. Publishers Weekly notes that Rosenblum “doesn’t identify or describe” the victim “until the end.”

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: Rosenblum gets the specific economics of a Fire Island town right. Publishers Weekly notes how the “men measured themselves by their net worth and women by their tennis games.” Kirkus sums the cast up perfectly: “These characters are so readable and so terrible.” Publishers Weekly calls it “wickedly entertaining.”

Fair warning: the cast is large and arrives all at once. Kirkus says that at first “there are too many regulars to keep track of,” and Publishers Weekly says Rosenblum “starts with broad strokes before really digging in to the various players.”

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Group two: the South Fork. Four books about the Hamptons, from four different distances from the money.

3. Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs (1991)

Read this if: it’s here because the detective is from the island and the victim is summer money. You want the one that knows the difference.

What you’re getting: A movie producer is shot by his own pool. Publishers Weekly sets it across “the various sections of Long Island’s Hamptons” and has the victim shot “by the side of his glitzy Southampton swimming pool.” Kirkus has Steve Brady as “a Long Island homicide detective” and puts the prime suspect “in nearby Bridgehampton.” Then he falls for her.

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: this is the best locals-versus-summer-people material of anything here, and Kirkus says flatly that this is “a locale Isaacs does perfectly.” The shooting happens behind the manicured bushes of a Southampton estate and the man investigating it is, in Kirkus’s words, “a Long Island homicide detective,” which is the gap the whole South Fork is built on.

Fair warning: Kirkus is cool on Isaacs as a crime writer: “Primitive as police procedurals go, and occasionally Steve’s hard-boiled voice doesn’t ring true,” with “the same witticism-wrapped, sappy center that always drives Isaacs fans dotty.” The romance with the suspect takes over the back half, and Kirkus describes the detective as “a recovered alcoholic and Vietnam vet.”

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4. The Guest by Emma Cline (2023)

Read this if: it’s here because somebody with no money is trying to stay in a place that costs money to be in. You want the one that will make you anxious.

What you’re getting: Kirkus gives it in a line: “A week in the life of a 22-year-old grifter in the Hamptons.” Alex is thrown out of her older boyfriend’s house and has to last until his Labor Day party at the end of the week, which she does by attaching herself to other people’s rentals. The same review notes the location “is unnamed but clearly recognizable.”

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: Cline writes the South Fork as a place with no public option. There is nowhere to sit, nowhere to sleep, and no way to be there without being somebody’s guest, which turns a beach holiday into a survival problem. Publishers Weekly puts the reading experience plainly: “Like watching a car crash, this is hard to look away from.”

Fair warning: no body, no detective, no solution. Kirkus says Cline’s “cliffhanger ending cuts us off like a mean drug dealer,” so if an unresolved ending ruins a book for you, take Magic Hour instead. Content: sex work and stolen painkillers.

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5. Amagansett by Mark Mills (2004)

Read this if: it’s here because a working fisherman nets a rich man’s daughter and has to decide what to do about it. You want the historical one.

What you’re getting: 1947. Kirkus says “Mills’s research into Long Island’s South Fork fishing village of Amagansett as it was in 1947 stands forth with superb detail.” Conrad Labarde, a Basque American fisherman back from the war, pulls a body out of his net. Publishers Weekly places her in “a powerful Long Island family” and the body in “the waters off the Hamptons.”

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: this is the South Fork before the money finished arriving, when the fishing families and the summer houses were still in open negotiation. Mills runs the fisherman’s private inquiry in parallel with the deputy sheriff’s, so you get both sides of a town at once. Publishers Weekly calls it “Probing, morally nuanced and rich with period detail.”

Fair warning: Kirkus says Mills lets you know who the bad guys are “halfway through,” and calls it “less murder mystery than, well, epic drama.” The same review notes that “perhaps a fifth of the pages fill in Conrad’s incredible war record.”

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6. The Darkest Place by Daniel Judson (2006)

Read this if: it’s here because it’s the Hamptons in winter, with young men turning up in the bay. You want the bleakest one.

What you’re getting: Publishers Weekly describes how “residents of the Hamptons are shocked at the drowning deaths of several young men found in the icy winter waters of Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay.” Kirkus confirms the water: “A series of young men have been found floating in Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay.” A grieving professor gets framed for it, and a local private investigator works the same deaths for a victim’s parents.

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: Judson writes the version of this place where nobody is on holiday. Shinnecock Bay in winter is a real and specific body of water rather than a postcard, and both reviews name it, which is the test this post is built on. Take Judson over The Guest if you want an actual investigation out of season.

Fair warning: Kirkus is the harshest review on this whole page: a “long and tedious lead-up,” a revelation “not easy to swallow,” and the verdict that Judson “writes much better than he plots.” Publishers Weekly is kinder but calls it “brooding if uneven.” Alcoholism and a child’s death are on the page.

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Group three: the rest of the island. The three books that remember Long Island keeps going well past the last Hamptons farm stand.

7. Plum Island by Nelson DeMille (1997)

Read this if: it’s here because it’s the only book on the page that takes the North Fork seriously. You want the big fun one.

What you’re getting: Two Plum Island biologists are murdered. John Corey, an NYPD detective recuperating at his uncle’s place, consults for the local police. Kirkus places it precisely: not “the Fitzgeraldian wealth of Oyster Bay but rather the North Fork’s comfortably well-off,” with the Chief of the Southold Town PD and a house “overlooking Great Peconic Bay.”

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: DeMille names the actual places. Southold, Great Peconic Bay, the North Fork and Plum Island itself all turn up in the Kirkus review, which almost never happens with books set out here, and the geography does real work in the plot because the island in question is a federal facility you cannot simply drive to. Kirkus poses the question the whole plot hangs off: “Were the Gordons murdered because they’d stolen some valuable new vaccine, or even a dreaded virus?”

Fair warning: it’s a long one, and Publishers Weekly notes DeMille layers in “assorted love interests” along the way before capping it with a ferocious storm at sea. Neither review registers a real complaint, which is rarer than it sounds. The wisecracking is relentless, so if a jokey narrator grates, start elsewhere.

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8. Sunrise Highway by Peter Blauner (2018)

Read this if: it’s here because the Long Island in it is a county police department rather than a beach. You want the angriest book on the page.

What you’re getting: Publishers Weekly describes “a trail of murdered women along Long Island’s Route 27 (aka Sunrise Highway) that dates back to 1977,” and an NYPD detective, Lourdes Robles, working “numerous murders out of her jurisdiction in Suffolk County.” Kirkus has the other half of the book following a man who “rises to become top cop on Long Island in 2017.”

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: this is the Long Island of Route 27 at rush hour, strip malls and jurisdictional lines, and Blauner uses the one thing that actually structures the place: county policing. The reason a body can sit unexamined for decades here is that Suffolk is not NYPD, and the book is built on that seam. Publishers Weekly calls it “a page-turner of the highest order.”

Fair warning: Blauner is not writing a whodunit. Kirkus states it outright: “The murderer is revealed early on, and the story shifts among several time frames.” Publishers Weekly lists the subject matter as “police corruption, misogyny, and racism,” and the victims are women, described in detail. One of the two story lines starts with a body on a beach in Far Rockaway, Queens, before the case crosses into Suffolk.

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9. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2024)

Read this if: it’s here because the crime happened forty years ago in a driveway and everyone has been paying for it since. You want the funniest one.

What you’re getting: Publishers Weekly sets up the crime, in 1980: “wealthy polystyrene manufacturer Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his Long Island home and held for a week.” Four decades later his three adult children are still arranging their lives around it, and then, as the same review notes, “due to a series of financial reversals, the family fortune they’ve all depended on is gone.”

Why it belongs on a Long Island list: the inherited-money family home is the Long Island almost no thriller goes to. Kirkus says “even the crime at the center of the book is a (very sad and twisted) version of the Long Island compromise,” which is a joke about this specific place and its specific bargain. Kirkus calls it “A great American Jewish novel whose brew of hilarity, heartbreak, and smarts recalls the best of Philip Roth.”

Fair warning: the register is comic over a violent crime, which won’t suit everyone. Kirkus calls the result “the glorious festival of schadenfreude,” and Publishers Weekly notes one lead has “a secret drug and BDSM addiction.” Note it is a different book from Colm Tóibín’s Long Island.

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Which One to Read Tonight

Three moods, three books, depending on what you want the island to be tonight.

• For the one that’s pure holiday reading: Bad Summer People, which Kirkus calls “A heck of a beach read.”
• For the big one you can disappear into: Plum Island, and give it a weekend rather than a weeknight.
• When you want to be properly angry about something real: Sunrise Highway, which is about how a county polices its own missing women.

FAQ: Books Set on Long Island

What Are the Best Books Set on Long Island?

These nine, in the order above: The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest, Bad Summer People, Magic Hour, The Guest, Amagansett, The Darkest Place, Plum Island, Sunrise Highway and Long Island Compromise. They’re grouped by the barrier islands, the South Fork and the rest of the island, not ranked.

What Are the Best Long Island Thriller Books?

Sunrise Highway and Plum Island, because both are built for momentum before anything else. Publishers Weekly calls Blauner’s “a page-turner of the highest order.” If what you want from long island thriller books is momentum, start with either of those two. The Storm Reaper is the slow-burn exception, and the only one set in hurricane season.

What Are the Best North Fork Mystery Books?

Realistically, one: Plum Island. Kirkus places DeMille squarely in “the North Fork’s comfortably well-off,” with the Chief of the Southold Town PD and a house “overlooking Great Peconic Bay.” North fork mystery books are genuinely thin on the ground, which is the honest answer rather than padding this list with South Fork books pretending otherwise.

What Are the Best Books Set in Suffolk County?

Sunrise Highway first, because the county’s own policing is the subject. Publishers Weekly has an NYPD detective working “numerous murders out of her jurisdiction in Suffolk County.” It is the one book here where a review names the county outright, which is why, among books set in Suffolk County, it is the only one I will vouch for by name.

Which of These Are Set on Fire Island?

Two, and they’re the same island in opposite seasons. Bad Summer People is summer, with the inherited cottages full, and The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest is hurricane season with almost everybody gone, which is the version a year-rounder would recognise. As Goodreads reviewer Lisa Ellis put it: “Van Nest’s descriptions made it feel like I was personally walking down the streets and beaches of Fire Island.”

Which of These East End Thriller Books Is Set Out of Season?

The Darkest Place, which Publishers Weekly sets in “the icy winter waters of Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay.” Out of season is where these towns get interesting, because the people who are left are the ones who actually live there. Among the east end thriller books here it is the only one set out of season. The Storm Reaper is out of season too, but on the barrier island rather than the East End.

Which of These Is an Actual Whodunit?

Plum Island, Magic Hour and The Darkest Place. Three of the others deliberately aren’t: Kirkus says of Blauner’s Sunrise Highway, set on Long Island, that “The murderer is revealed early on,” and the same magazine says Mills gives up the bad guys halfway through Amagansett. The Guest has no solution at all.

Which Should I Read First If I’ve Never Been to Long Island?

Magic Hour, because it puts a Long Island detective and summer money in the same investigation and lets you feel the difference. Kirkus calls it “a locale Isaacs does perfectly.” Then go to Plum Island for the other fork.

What Are the Best Long Island Novels?

The best Long Island novels on this list split by coast. Plum Island by Nelson DeMille is the North Fork one, with an NYPD detective recovering at his uncle’s place when two biologists are murdered. Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs is the Hamptons one, built around a movie producer shot by his own Southampton pool. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is the funny one, about a family still living with a 1980 kidnapping.

What Are Good Books About Long Island With a Police Detective?

Sunrise Highway by Peter Blauner follows NYPD detective Lourdes Robles as she works a trail of murdered women along Route 27 in Suffolk County that goes back to 1977. For a homicide detective from the island itself, Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs has Steve Brady working a Southampton murder.

Are There Any Thrillers Set in Montauk?

None of the nine above is set in Montauk. If you want a thriller with a Montauk connection, try Beach Road by James Patterson and Peter de Jonge (2006). Its hero, Tom Dunleavy, is a small-time Montauk lawyer who defends a local man accused of a triple murder that has East Hampton in an uproar.

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