Editors Reads

Best Thriller Books

225 expert-reviewed books — page 6 of 10

The Names book cover

The Names

by Don DeLillo

4.3

James Axton, a risk analyst working in Athens in the early 1980s, becomes entangled with a cult that commits murders based on alphabetical correspondences between victims' initials and the place-names where they are killed. DeLillo's most purely thriller-shaped novel is also his most explicit meditation on language: the cult's strange grammar of death is the extreme version of the novel's central question — what is the relationship between words and the world?

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The Secret Place book cover

The Secret Place

by Tana French

4.3

A year after a boy was murdered on the grounds of a Dublin girls' boarding school, a card appears on the school's anonymous message board: 'I know who killed him.' Detective Stephen Moran sees his chance to make the Murder Squad.

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The Sum of All Fears book cover
4.3

Palestinian terrorists acquire a nuclear device and plant it at the Super Bowl. CIA Deputy Director Jack Ryan must identify the threat and prevent detonation while the world's superpowers are being manipulated toward confrontation. Clancy's most complex thriller works across multiple continents, governments, and ideologies simultaneously.

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The Woods book cover

The Woods

by Harlan Coben

4.3

Essex County Prosecutor Paul Copeland has carried the mystery of his sister's disappearance at summer camp for twenty years. When a corpse surfaces that appears to be her supposed killer — still alive until recently — every assumption unravels.

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Then She Was Gone book cover

Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

4.3

Ten years ago, fifteen-year-old Ellie Mack disappeared. Her mother Laurel has never recovered. When Laurel starts dating a charming widower named Floyd and meets his young daughter — who looks eerily like Ellie — the questions she buried begin to surface. A domestic thriller about obsessive love, missing daughters, and the families we construct from grief.

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Trunk Music book cover

Trunk Music

by Michael Connelly

4.3

A Hollywood film producer is found shot dead in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce in the hills above Mulholland Drive. The method — two bullets, body in the trunk — is a classic mob signature. Bosch's investigation pulls him from the Hollywood entertainment industry into the organized crime networks of Las Vegas.

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Worth Dying For book cover

Worth Dying For

by Lee Child

4.3

A detour through rural Nebraska puts Reacher between the Duncan family — a violent local crime dynasty that controls everything for miles — and the frightened community that has lived under their thumb for decades. A stripped-back Reacher story with the feel of a modern western.

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A Time for Mercy book cover

A Time for Mercy

by John Grisham

4.2

Jake Brigance returns to defend Drew Gamble, a sixteen-year-old who killed his mother's abusive boyfriend — a decorated local deputy — in the small town of Clanton, Mississippi. The third Jake Brigance novel is Grisham's richest portrait of the fictional Ford County he has built over three decades.

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A Wanted Man book cover

A Wanted Man

by Lee Child

4.2

Reacher hitches a ride with three strangers on a Nebraska highway and quickly determines that one of them is a killer. An FBI roadblock, a missing woman, and a trailer full of secrets turn a routine ride into something far more dangerous.

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Fool Me Once book cover

Fool Me Once

by Harlan Coben

4.2

Former military operative Maya Stern installs a nanny cam after her husband is murdered — and sees him on the footage two weeks later, alive and playing with their daughter.

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Foucault's Pendulum book cover

Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

4.2

Three editors at a Milan publishing house, bored with the occult manuscripts they process, invent an elaborate conspiracy theory connecting the Knights Templar to every secret society in history — only to find their fiction taking on a terrifying life of its own.

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Gone for Good book cover

Gone for Good

by Harlan Coben

4.2

Will Klein's brother Ken disappeared eleven years ago after a girl was murdered — and everyone assumed he was guilty. Now that girl's sister has been murdered, and Ken may be connected again.

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Kiss the Girls book cover

Kiss the Girls

by James Patterson

4.2

Alex Cross races to find a serial kidnapper called Casanova who keeps intelligent, accomplished women as captives in an underground harem — while simultaneously discovering that his own niece Naomi has become one of Casanova's victims.

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Nine Dragons book cover

Nine Dragons

by Michael Connelly

4.2

The murder of a Hong Kong immigrant liquor store owner in South Los Angeles leads Bosch into a confrontation with triad extortion networks — and then to Hong Kong itself, when a video surfaces appearing to show his daughter Maddie in danger.

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No Second Chance book cover

No Second Chance

by Harlan Coben

4.2

Marc Seidman wakes in hospital — shot, his wife dead, his infant daughter missing. Six months later a ransom demand arrives, and the investigation into who took his daughter opens questions about who his wife actually was.

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One by One book cover

One by One

by Ruth Ware

4.2

A tech startup's team-building ski trip in the French Alps turns deadly when an avalanche traps employees in a luxury chalet with no rescue in sight — and someone is killing them off while they wait. An Agatha Christie-style closed-room mystery in a contemporary setting, with a cast of colleagues who each have reasons to want each other dead.

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Patriot Games book cover

Patriot Games

by Tom Clancy

4.2

While vacationing in London, CIA analyst Jack Ryan foils an IRA assassination attempt on the Prince of Wales and becomes the target of a vengeful splinter faction determined to kill him and his family on American soil.

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Pattern Recognition book cover

Pattern Recognition

by William Gibson

4.2

Cayce Pollard, a coolhunter with a pathological sensitivity to corporate branding, is hired to trace the source of mysterious film footage appearing anonymously online — footage that obsesses millions of people worldwide.

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Pompeii book cover

Pompeii

by Robert Harris

4.2

In the four days before Vesuvius erupts in 79 AD, a young Roman engineer named Attilius discovers that the great aqueduct serving the Bay of Naples has been poisoned — and that the corruption he uncovers runs as deep as the mountain's roots.

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Strangers on a Train book cover

Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

4.2

Two strangers meet on a train: Guy Haines, an architect trying to escape his unhappy marriage, and Charles Bruno, a wealthy charming sociopath. Bruno proposes a perfect crime — they will swap murders, each killing the other's problem person. Guy refuses, but Bruno kills his wife anyway, then demands Guy complete the bargain. Highsmith's debut novel and the template for her entire career: the complicity between the guilty and the innocent, the creeping contamination of violence.

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The Blind Man of Seville book cover

The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

4.2

Inspector Javier Falcón of the Seville homicide squad is called to the scene of a man found dead in front of a painting of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son — eyes burnt out, posed with deliberate horror. The investigation pulls Falcón into his own family history, specifically the life of his celebrated father, the painter Francisco Falcón. Set against Seville's streets and its Moorish architecture, the first Falcón novel establishes one of crime fiction's most psychologically complex detectives.

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The Brothers Hawthorne book cover

The Brothers Hawthorne

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

4.2

Grayson and Jameson Hawthorne find themselves on separate, dangerous missions — Grayson drawn into a high-stakes game that threatens everything his family built, Jameson on a globe-trotting adventure that tests the limits of his recklessness. A dual POV expansion of the Hawthorne brothers' world.

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The Family Remains book cover

The Family Remains

by Lisa Jewell

4.2

A sequel to The Family Upstairs: Rachel Rimmer goes to France to attend the funeral of a woman who may have been her mother — and discovers connections to the dark Chelsea house of her past. Simultaneously, Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu investigates a body found in the Thames. Two investigations converge on the same terrible story.

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The Guardians book cover

The Guardians

by John Grisham

4.2

Quincy Miller has spent twenty-two years on death row for the murder of a small-town Florida lawyer, a crime he insists he did not commit. When a handwritten letter reaches a small innocence organisation, its director takes on the case — knowing that the real killer is still out there and still dangerous.

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