Corporate grind thinning you out ✅
Brain running 47 open tabs ✅
Lying in bed at 11pm, staring at the ceiling✅
Now here is the part where everyone expects me to say: I made chamomile tea, I journaled, I did a breathing exercise. But honestly? I opened a book where someone got murdered on the first page, and I slept like a baby.
There’s a certain kind of woman who decompresses over crime. Didi has a true crime podcast on during her commute, a thriller on her nightstand, and zero guilt about it.
I am that Didi. That Didi is me.
The thing is, I am not a morbid person — I am inherently wired to hope and solution. In a world that constantly hands us chaos with no explanation, crime fiction gives us something rare: a thread to follow. A reckoning at the end. Someone always figures out the solutions and that, weirdly, is the most calming thing for me. For a lot of us, it is a crime scene on page one and a desperate need to know who did it and why.
So here are the authors who have been watering my dark little decompression plant kit :
Frieda McFadden
The Intruder: A woman moves into her dream home and slowly starts to feel like she isn’t alone. The dread builds quietly — domestic safety stripped away one creak of the floorboard at a time — until it all snaps at once.
The Housemaid: A desperate woman takes a live-in housemaid job with a picture-perfect family, and very quickly, nothing about them is what it seems. Every chapter peels back a new layer — the kind that makes you mutter “I knew it” and “wait, what?!” on the same page. Not-so-much-readers can catch the movie on Prime Video.
Keigo Higoshino
The Devotion of Suspect X : Higashino hands you the killer, the crime, and the method on the very first pages — the entire novel is about whether they’ll get away with it. A flipped mystery that reads like watching two grandmasters play chess, where you are rooting for moves that probably shouldn’t be rooted for.
Malice: A celebrated author is found dead and his best friend is the prime suspect — but the more Detective Kaga digs, the more the motive keeps rewriting itself. Quiet, cerebral, and genuinely devastating in the final act. Higashino’s best, in my opinion.
Holly Jackson
A good girl’s guide to murder : Pip Fitz-Amobi reopens a closed murder case as a school project and, in doing so, unravels an entire town’s worth of buried secrets. Smart, fast, and genuinely impossible to put down — the kind of series you finish in a weekend and then feel briefly bereft over. It is a 3 part series book. Not-so-much-readers can catch the movie on Netflix.
Stieg Larsson
The Girl with The Dragon tattoo: A disgraced journalist and Lisbeth Salander — one of fiction’s most electric, unforgettable women — investigates a decades-old disappearance buried inside a cold, powerful Swedish family. Dark, intricate, and the kind of book that makes you feel like a detective yourself by the end.
Uketsu
The Strange Room : A writer is asked to investigate a Tokyo house with a deeply unsettling floor plan — a hidden “dead space” between the walls with no doors. What follows is part puzzle, part horror, part family saga, told through chilling architectural blueprints you are actively invited to decode. Uketsu is a Japanese mystery-horror YouTuber whose face nobody has ever seen, and honestly, that energy absolutely carries into the writing.
Read my book review on Uketsu’s The Strange Pictures
Reading Crime fiction is close to an addiction for me. It’s more than just entertainment as like I said before, at its core, a stubborn act of hope. It says: even the worst kind of mess can be understood, and resolved. That behind every locked room and unreliable narrator, someone will still do the work of finding the truth. That chaos — whether it is your inbox, your 9-to-5, or a fictional murder in a Swedish village — does not get the last word.
Decompress in whatever way works for you. But if you ever want company in the dark, a good thriller will never let you down. There is always light at the end of the tunnel.
Which genre is your decompression default — cozy or full-on crime?
Let’s chat in the comments! You can also find me on Facebook and Instagram.
Ordo Ab Chao 
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