Best Thriller Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A brilliant, obsessive madman abducts a prominent psychiatrist and her two daughters, holding them captive while he plays a deadly game of wits with the police. Lucas Davenport faces a kidnapper smarter than anyone he has hunted — a man who knows more about the human mind, and how to break it, than Davenport himself.

A retired detective haunted by an unsolved massacre — a stolen Mercedes driven into a crowd of job-seekers — is taunted back into the hunt when the killer contacts him directly. Stephen King's Edgar Award-winning leap into the pure crime thriller.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Three years after the trial that made his name, Jake Brigance is handed a stunning case: a dying white millionaire hangs himself and leaves his entire fortune to his Black housekeeper, cutting out his family. The contested will reopens old wounds in a Mississippi town still divided by race.

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.

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.

A New Year's Eve death on a military base in 1990 pulls Major Jack Reacher into a murder investigation as the Cold War ends. Lee Child rewinds the clock to Reacher's army days, delivering a tense, procedural prequel and a rare look at the man in uniform.

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.

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.

Suspended from the LAPD and ordered into therapy after assaulting his commanding officer, Harry Bosch turns his enforced downtime toward the one case he could never close: the unsolved murder of his own mother, a prostitute killed when he was a boy. The investigation forces him to confront the wound that made him.

On an island that is the last refuge of humanity after an apocalyptic fog killed the rest of the world, someone has murdered the scientist maintaining the barrier that keeps the fog at bay. If the murderer isn't found in 107 hours, the barrier falls and everyone dies. Turton's most structurally inventive mystery: a closed-room that is an entire civilisation.