(Image credit: Various publishers)

Two of our absolute favorite book genres here at Marie Claire are romance and thriller . Across the board, novels in both categories (and their extended families of niche subgenres ) are addicting, exciting, and guaranteed to get you out of even the deepest reading slumps. Fortunately for fellow lovers of both romances and thrillers , you never have to make the near-impossible choice of one or the other, thanks to the romantic thriller .

Romantic thriller novels combine key elements of both genres, with an often spicy romantic entanglement layered on top of—and sometimes further complicating—a core mystery or suspense-filled plotline .…