Best Thriller Books

Claudia Lin works for Veracity, a secret company that investigates online dating profiles for clients who want to know if their matches are who they say they are. When a client turns up dead, Claudia finds herself investigating a case that could upend her understanding of digital identity, love, and the surveillance economy.

Digging swimming pools in the Florida Keys, Jack Reacher is found by a dying detective and pulled into a decades-old mystery from the Vietnam War. Lee Child's third Reacher thriller blends a propulsive hunt with one of the series' nastiest villains.

Texas detective Odette Tucker is obsessed with the cold case of her best friend Trumanell, who vanished a decade ago. When a mute girl is found wandering in a field near the old Tucker property, Odette must confront a past she has spent years trying to escape.

In the frozen north woods of Wisconsin, a family is butchered and their house burned. Lucas Davenport, living in self-imposed exile at his cabin, is pulled into the hunt for a killer known as the Iceman — a predator who knows the snowbound country far better than the law does, and who will kill again to protect his secret.

A penetration tester comes home to find her husband murdered — and herself the prime suspect. On the run and armed only with her hacking skills, Jacintha Cross must clear her name before the police close in. Ruth Ware delivers a breathless, propulsive chase thriller.

A Norton Aircraft wide-body transatlantic flight arrives in Los Angeles with three dead and fifty-six injured after a mysterious in-flight incident nobody can explain. Quality Assurance VP Casey Singleton has 72 hours to reconstruct what happened before a damaging television news investigation airs — and before the company loses a billion-dollar sale to China.

Framed as a story Alex Cross wrote about his own family's past, this historical novel follows Ben Corbett, a Washington lawyer sent by President Roosevelt to investigate a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan terror in 1906 Mississippi — where he confronts lynching, injustice, and a town's buried conscience.

A crusading civil-rights attorney who made his name suing the LAPD is shot dead on the Angels Flight funicular railway. Harry Bosch catches a case that could set the whole city alight — and that forces him to investigate the police department he serves, knowing the wrong answer could spark a second Los Angeles riot.

Sonchai is sent a snuff film by an anonymous source — a murder so perfectly executed that it functions as art. The investigation leads into the world of the Thai sex industry, the Buddhist concept of karma and rebirth, and a case that forces Sonchai to examine his own complicity in the system he polices. The third Sonchai novel, the most Buddhist in its philosophical dimension.

A CIA agent is found murdered in a Bangkok brothel, his body covered in religious tattoos. Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep investigates — navigating between the American intelligence community, the Thai sex industry, the Buddhist spirit world, and his mother's complex position as a mamasan. The second Sonchai novel deepens the portrait of Bangkok as a city where Western and Thai moral frameworks operate in permanent collision.

Medway is drawn into the toxic world of Nigerian oil money and the corruption that surrounds it — a missing girl, a lethal cargo, and the specific violence of Lagos. Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The third and finest Medway novel.

Retired FBI profiler Terry McCaleb is recovering from a heart transplant when a woman asks him to investigate a murder: her sister's. The victim was McCaleb's heart donor. Bound by an unpayable debt to the dead, McCaleb takes the case — and uncovers a connection between the murder and his own second chance at life that is more sinister than he could imagine.

Five original F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts are stolen from Princeton's rare books vault. A young novelist struggling with her career is recruited by an insurance company to befriend a Florida bookseller suspected of brokering their sale. Grisham's most bookish novel — more literary caper than legal thriller.

A tech consortium races into the Congo rainforest to find a lost city — and the deposits of industrial diamonds it holds. They are joined by a primatologist and her signing gorilla named Amy, who may hold the key to what killed the previous expedition. Crichton combines African adventure, corporate espionage, and animal intelligence research.

Now a private psychologist, Alex Cross is pulled back into the field when his old partner asks for help with a sadistic rapist. The case reopens the oldest wound of Cross's life — the unsolved murder of his wife Maria — and sets him on the trail of the mob enforcer who may have pulled the trigger.

A friendly St. Bernard contracts rabies and traps a mother and her young son inside a broken-down car on a sweltering summer day in rural Maine. With no supernatural element, King strips horror down to its barest components: an animal, heat, thirst, and time running out.

Working the late show — the LAPD's lonely overnight shift — Detective Renée Ballard finds a stranger going through old files at her station. He is Harry Bosch, chasing the long-cold murder of a teenage runaway no one else cares about. Two relentless detectives, a generation apart, join forces over a girl the system forgot.

Renée Ballard, now running the LAPD's revived cold-case unit, recruits a retired Harry Bosch with an irresistible lure: the chance to finally solve the case that has haunted him for years — the slaughter of an entire family, buried in the desert. As they chase two cold cases, Bosch confronts his white whale.

Brady Hartsfield should be a vegetable in a hospital bed — but something has awakened in him, a power to reach into minds and drive the vulnerable to suicide. Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney face their oldest enemy one last time in the trilogy's chilling finale.

In 2043, American soldiers fight a distant war by remotely operating robotic killing machines called soldierboys — linked neurally in teams of ten — while a physicist discovers a plot to recreate the Big Bang that would destroy the universe.

When Letty, Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter, gets a desperate call from a young drifter she once helped, Lucas is drawn into the hunt for a roving cult led by a charismatic monster called Pilate — a band of killers preying on the 'travelers' who drift along the margins of America.

When a bedroom game goes catastrophically wrong, Jessie Burlingame is left handcuffed to a bed in an isolated lake house — alone, with her husband dead on the floor. Stephen King spins a single, claustrophobic predicament into a harrowing psychological survival story.

Now a U.S. Marshal with a roving national brief, Lucas Davenport takes on his first big case: hunting a vicious robber who stole millions from a drug cartel and left a trail of bodies. But Lucas isn't the only one chasing the money — the cartel has sent two of its most ruthless killers to find the thief first.

Seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is living freely in Florence under an assumed identity, pursued simultaneously by a vengeful Mason Verger — the only surviving victim — and by Clarice Starling, now an embattled FBI agent.