I love thrillers, but sometimes there are subjects I simply don’t fancy reading about.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I want a nice gentle book where nothing horrible happens. If I’m picking up a psychological thriller, somebody can absolutely disappear under suspicious circumstances before chapter three. I just might not want that particular book to contain sexual violence, harm to a child or an animal dying.
That is where finding the right thriller becomes surprisingly difficult.
A synopsis will happily tell you that a woman has moved into an isolated cottage and started receiving mysterious messages. It generally won’t tell you whether a dog dies halfway through, the storyline involves infertility or there is a sexual assault in somebody’s past.
So I decided to make something that I would actually find useful myself.
Find a thriller without the things you don’t want to read about
The thriller finder below lets you choose the topics you would rather avoid.
You don’t have to tick everything that might potentially be upsetting. The idea is simply to tell it about your own particular no-go subjects.
You can then narrow things down further by the type of thriller you fancy, how dark you are happy for it to be and roughly how long a book you want.
Tick anything you would rather avoid, then narrow the results if you want to. Content notes can contain mild spoilers, but the tool will not reveal plot details.
Topics I want to avoid
What sort of thriller?
That last option is deliberately strict, so it will produce a much smaller set of results at the moment.
Your thriller suggestions
The results aren’t intended to tell you that a book is completely harmless. It would be a slightly odd promise to make about a thriller in the first place.
Instead, the finder checks your choices against the content information currently held for each book and leaves out books where one of your selected subjects appears in those notes.
Why I wanted to make a thriller trigger filter
Content warnings can be quite personal.
One reader might be perfectly comfortable reading about murder, serial killers and some truly questionable fictional husbands but immediately put a book down if an animal is harmed.
Someone else might avoid books involving pregnancy loss. Another reader might not want stories involving domestic abuse, suicide or eating disorders.
It isn’t really about deciding that certain books shouldn’t contain difficult subjects. Sometimes those subjects are exactly what makes a book powerful.
It is simply useful to know what you are choosing.
There are also times when the same person will make different choices. You might read something incredibly dark one month and want absolutely none of it the next.
Being able to say, “Give me a twisty thriller, but please leave this particular thing out of it”, therefore seems rather useful.
What can I filter out?
I’ve concentrated on subjects that regularly come up when people discuss thriller content warnings.
At the moment you can ask the finder to avoid books where our notes include sexual assault or sexual violence, domestic abuse, harm to children, animal abuse or death, pregnancy, infertility, suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, substance misuse, graphic violence, torture, kidnapping, stalking, infidelity, some mental-health themes, bullying or grooming.
You can tick one or several.
It means, for example, that you can still look for a very dark psychological thriller while asking it to exclude animal deaths.
That is quite different from simply having a “nothing upsetting please” button.
Where does the content-warning information come from?
This is something I think is particularly important to be clear about.
Whenever an author or publisher provides their own content warnings, that is the source I would prefer to use.
Freida McFadden is a particularly good example because she publishes content warnings for her books on her own website. They cover subjects ranging from domestic violence and animal abuse to infertility, suicide and sexual assault.
For other books, reader reports can be useful too. Goodreads has a large community of readers who discuss triggers and content warnings, and there are Goodreads shelves and lists devoted to particular subjects.
Those reports aren’t the same thing as an official author warning, though.
One reader might mention something another reader doesn’t, and a topic that feels significant to one person might barely register with somebody else.
That is why this finder deliberately says that none of your selected topics appear in our current content notes rather than promising that a particular book definitely doesn’t contain them.
If avoiding a subject is especially important for you, I would still check the author’s website, publisher information and several reader reviews before starting the book.
Yes, that might spoil a tiny part of the story.
Sometimes I’d rather know.
Content warnings can contain spoilers
This is the awkward part.
It is almost impossible to give detailed content warnings for some thrillers without revealing something about the plot.
Even knowing that a book contains pregnancy, suicide, kidnapping or animal harm could tell you more than the blurb intended.
I have therefore kept the actual recommendations deliberately simple. The finder tells you which subjects appear in our notes without explaining who they happen to or when.
If avoiding a particular subject matters more to you than going into a book completely blind, that trade-off is probably worthwhile.
Can I still find really dark thrillers?
Absolutely.
Avoiding one particular trigger doesn’t mean you want a cosy mystery and a cup of tea.
You can tell the finder that very dark books are fine and simply exclude the things you personally don’t want.
I think this is one of the most useful things about approaching recommendations this way.
“Dark” isn’t one subject.
A reader might enjoy frightening books, unreliable narrators, murder, obsession and thoroughly unpleasant characters while wanting nothing involving sexual assault.
Another might be fine with graphic crime scenes but unable to read about harm to children.
Those are completely different reading preferences.
What if I don’t have any particular triggers?
You can still use it.
Leave all the avoidance boxes unticked and use the other filters to find psychological thrillers, domestic thrillers, crime stories, locked-room mysteries or darker horror-leaning books.
If you’re simply stuck wondering what to read next rather than trying to avoid something specific, you might also prefer my What Book Should I Read Next? generator.
That one looks at mood, genre, length, romance and darkness across lots of different types of books rather than concentrating solely on thrillers.
Why isn’t murder one of the main filters?
Mostly because we’d very quickly run out of thrillers.
Murder and death are part of an enormous proportion of crime and psychological thrillers, so I haven’t treated them in quite the same way as the more specific subjects above.
The tool does still hold information about murder where it is included in the source content notes. It just isn’t one of the main exclusion boxes.
Otherwise you might ask it for a murder-free murder mystery and cause the poor thing an existential crisis.
What if the finder can’t find ten books?
The more boxes you tick, the smaller the pool becomes.
That is particularly true if you combine several exclusions with a very specific type of thriller.
If you get only a handful of suggestions, try relaxing the length or darkness preference first rather than removing a content filter that genuinely matters to you.
I’d much rather the tool say it only has four suitable matches than fill the remaining six spaces with books that don’t meet what you asked for.
Content warnings aren’t criticism
I think this is worth saying too.
Listing a difficult subject in a book isn’t a criticism of the author, and it doesn’t mean I think the subject shouldn’t have been included.
Books can explore horrible, painful and uncomfortable things brilliantly.
A content warning simply gives the reader information.
Sometimes I actively want the book that’s going to make me stare at the wall afterwards wondering what on earth I’ve just read.
Sometimes I don’t.
Both are perfectly legitimate ways to choose your next book.
Help me improve the thriller finder
I want this database to keep getting better as I add more books and more reliable content information.
If you spot a book where an important content warning appears to be missing, please let me know rather than assuming I’ve deliberately left it out.
There are hundreds of books in the finder and content information can change as authors publish their own warnings or readers flag subjects that haven’t previously been recorded.
For now, use it as a starting point, find yourself something wonderfully twisty and hopefully avoid the particular thing you really didn’t fancy reading about tonight.