Best Thriller Books

In a brutal near-future America, desperate man Ben Richards enters a televised game show where contestants are hunted across the country and killed for entertainment — and prize money his family cannot survive without.

Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective, buys a fixer-upper in rural Ireland seeking quiet and distance from his old life. A boy named Trey asks him to find his missing brother — and what Cal uncovers pulls him into a community with deep roots and older loyalties than he understands.

Anton Waker, who has spent years laundering documents and facilitating his family's criminal enterprises, tries to go straight by taking an office job — only to find that the past is not easily outrun. Mandel's second novel is more overtly thriller-shaped than her debut, with multiple timelines and unreliable perspectives dissolving into a portrait of complicity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a Nevada desert facility, a cloud of self-replicating nanobots has escaped containment, evolved predatory behavior, and begun hunting the humans outside. Jack Forman — a software engineer and stay-at-home dad — must enter the facility to stop the experiment before the swarm becomes something that cannot be stopped at all.

A cloud of self-replicating nanobots escapes a remote Nevada research facility and begins evolving with terrifying speed, forcing a stay-at-home software engineer to confront a threat that is simultaneously invisible, intelligent, and multiplying. Michael Crichton's nanotechnology thriller melds evolutionary biology with edge-of-your-seat suspense.

A team of scientists is assembled under the Pacific Ocean to investigate a mysterious spacecraft found on the ocean floor — a spacecraft that pre-dates any known human technology. Inside they find a perfect gold sphere. And then the sphere begins to respond to them, and the real terror begins.

The six Alexandrians have been initiated into the Alexandrian Society — the secret organisation that controls the world's most powerful knowledge. Now they must each prove their worth to the Caretakers, competing and conspiring among themselves while an external threat to the Society itself emerges. The second book in Olivie Blake's Atlas series.

Walter Stackhouse reads in the newspaper about the case of Melchior Kimmel, a bookseller accused of staging his wife's death as a bus accident. Walter, trapped in his own unhappy marriage, becomes obsessed with Kimmel's method. When his wife subsequently dies in similar circumstances, Kimmel turns the tables — he begins investigating Walter with the intensity of someone who recognises a mirror image.

The nameless narrator of The Sympathizer arrives in 1980s Paris with his blood brother Bon, navigating the Vietnamese exile community, Algerian drug networks, and French intellectual life while still haunted by his double-consciousness and the interrogations he survived.

Set partly in WWII Lisbon — neutral Portugal as the espionage capital of Europe — and partly in the present day, as Javier Falcón investigates a case that connects to wartime intelligence operations. Wilson returns to the Portugal of A Small Death in Lisbon to interweave Falcón's modern investigation with the wartime story of an SOE agent and the shadowy world of competing intelligence services in neutral Lisbon.

Two timelines converge around the Montglane Service, a chess set once owned by Charlemagne whose pieces are said to grant limitless power — one story following a nun during the French Revolution, another a computer expert in the 1970s drawn into a deadly global game.

A group of friends gather on a private Greek island for a holiday with a faded Hollywood actress. Within days, one of them will be dead — and the narrator, playwright Elliot Chase, must reconstruct what happened before the killer strikes again.

Philip Carter serves six years in an American federal prison for a crime he didn't commit — a financial conspiracy his employer framed him for. He comes out changed: harder, drug-dependent, capable of violence in ways he wasn't before. A novel about what prison does to a person and what happens when that person returns to a life that has changed without him.

Howard Ingham, an American writer, has come to Tunisia to work on a screenplay. His fiancée doesn't arrive. A colleague dies ambiguously. One night Ingham may have killed an intruder with a typewriter. He isn't certain. Set almost entirely in Hammamet, Tunisia, this is Highsmith's most existential novel — the question of whether Ingham committed a crime becomes less important than the question of whether it matters to him that he might have.

Athens, 1960s. Rydal Keener, a young American drifting through Greece on his father's money, encounters Chester MacFarland — a small-time con man on the run with his wife Colette. When Chester accidentally kills a man and Rydal witnesses it, the two become fatally linked. A thriller set across Greek landscapes — Athens, Crete, Istanbul — exploring the father-son dynamic between two men who are drawn to each other and threatening to each other.