Though the books on this year’s list are a varied group, with wildly different approaches to plot, tone and style, they’re all surprising in the best possible way: They keep the reader off-balance and guessing until the very end.

The Doorman

by Chris Pavone

This hyperkinetic state-of-the-city mystery unfolds over a single tumultuous day that begins with an ominous foreshadowing of someone’s death and gathers force like a ferocious storm. Racial tensions, political hatred, the corrosive power of money — Pavone is an excellent anatomizer of present-day New York even as his muscular prose pulls us toward the book’s stunning, and murderous, climax.

Your Steps on the Stairs

by Antonio Muñoz Molina

This elliptical thriller by one of Spain’s literary superstars, beautifully translated by Curtis Bauer, burns slowly and uneasily. Suffused with anxiety about the state of the world, an unnamed man who recently relocated from New York to Lisbon is waiting for his beloved wife to join him in their new apartment. But he seems to have a slippery grasp on the details and maybe on reality itself. Reading this book is like hearing an alarm go off in a neighbor’s house and wondering whether it’s actually ringing for you.

Venetian Vespers

by John Banville

Venice in 1900 makes a deliciously dark backdrop to Banville’s expertly plotted tale of Evelyn Dolman, a puffed-up English writer whose American wife — an heiress who seems unfortunately to have been disinherited — goes missing from their cavernous rented palazzo. Self-regarding without being self-aware, Dolman soon finds himself in the center of a diabolical web of intrigue, “the main suspect in a crime that as far as anyone knew had not been committed.”

The Impossible Thing

by Belinda Bauer

The cutthroat trade in rare birds’ eggs in Britain is the unlikely subject of this ingenious and charming mystery. In 1926, a young girl plucks a gorgeous bright red egg from a guillemot’s nest on the side of a cliff; decades later, it’s an object of obsession, with vicious criminals, deranged collectors and watchful bird enthusiasts all eager to get their grubby hands on it. Bauer brings everyone to vivid life, including the determined guillemot who laid the egg. She gets the book’s final word.

Dissolution

by Nicholas Binge

Binge continues his habit of unsettling readers with this chronology-bending work of speculative fiction about time, memory and the hubris of scientists seeking to subvert the laws of physics. It begins with the interrogation of an elderly woman by a shadowy figure trying to use her as a conduit to the memories of her husband, a scientist in the throes of Alzheimer’s whose past might contain a crucial secret. No pressure, but the future of the world might be at stake.

The Vanishing Place

by Zoë Rankin

After a starving, blood-covered girl turns up in a remote New Zealand village, a young woman named Effie — who fled the same place nearly a quarter-century earlier — returns home to face up to the murky details of her past. Rankin’s beautifully written book takes the reader deep into the landscape and toggles between two timelines, past and present, as Effie struggles to reconcile the fragments of her life. Can she prevent history from repeating itself?

A Beautiful Family

by Jennifer Trevelyan

It’s 1985 in New Zealand, and the family at the center of Trevelyan’s deceptively languid tale of murder and miscommunication is having a not-so-beautiful seaside vacation: The parents are grumpy, the two daughters are mostly unsupervised, and a sketchy man lives next door. Menace hums beneath the surface, and it’s clear that the narrator, 10-year-old Alix, has only a partial understanding of the events swirling around her. Then someone goes missing.

The Good Liar

by Denise Mina

This cracker of a story by one of Scotland’s most acclaimed mystery writers begins as Claudia O’Sheil, a forensic scientist, is poised to give a talk about a notorious double murder she helped solve. But she’s considering ripping up the speech and revealing what really happened — a revelation that would surely ruin her career. Mina expertly threads questions of class, privilege and establishment conspiracy into a riveting tale of a woman weighing whether to give up everything for the sake of the truth.

The Predicament

by William Boyd

This is the second book in Boyd’s delicious historical espionage series starring Gabriel Dax, an English travel writer pulled into reluctant spydom in the early 1960s. This time, he’s sent to Berlin in 1962, where President John F. Kennedy is preparing to give his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. More “useful idiot,” as he puts it, than James Bond, Dax makes for an affable, Everyman operative, even when things get too serious for him to truly understand. “All this pretense, all this duplicity — it was exhausting,” he thinks. We can relate.

The Impossible Fortune

by Richard Osman

Known in Britain as the producer and host of TV quiz programs, Osman became an instant literary star with the publication of his best-selling debut novel, “The Thursday Murder Club,” in 2020. This is the fifth book in the series, which features a quartet of sharp-witted retirees who use their free time to solve the crimes that somehow keep popping up in their vicinity. In this installment, the gang delves into the mystery of a missing wedding guest, whose disappearance may have something to do with a car bomb and a large sum of Bitcoin.