Best Thriller Books

Crime reporter Jack McEvoy refuses to believe his twin brother, a homicide detective, killed himself. Digging into the death, McEvoy uncovers a pattern: detectives across the country dying in staged suicides, each marked with a line of Edgar Allan Poe. He has stumbled onto a serial killer — and a story that could destroy him.

A broke, freshly minted law graduate takes on a billion-dollar insurance company over a denied claim that cost a young man his life. With nothing but nerve and a paralegal sidekick, Rudy Baylor walks into his first-ever trial against a battalion of corporate lawyers.

In a landmark tobacco liability trial in Mississippi, a mysterious juror named Nicholas Easter appears to be manipulating the outcome from inside the jury box — while his accomplice outside works both sides of the case for an enormous payout.

Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer journeys across America — and across into a parallel realm called the Territories — to find a talisman that can save his dying mother. Stephen King and Peter Straub fuse epic fantasy quest and horror into a single sprawling road novel.

Rowan Caine writes a letter from prison, claiming to be innocent of the child's death she is accused of. She was a nanny at a remote Scottish smart-house — a high-tech home that watched her every move, recorded every conversation, and whose previous nannies kept leaving without explanation. A locked-room thriller for the surveillance age.

Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find a missing government worker who stole documents from a state senator. What begins as a routine job draws them into Dorchester's gang wars, racial politics, and the violence that underlies South Boston's civic surface.

Chloe Davis grew up in the shadow of her father's crimes — he was a serial killer who murdered six girls in their Louisiana town. Twenty years later, when girls start disappearing again, Chloe must decide whether history is repeating itself.

A British historian in post-Soviet Moscow discovers a notebook that may contain Stalin's most dangerous secret — one that leads him to the remote Arctic city of Archangel and a discovery that could reshape Russia's future.

Grief-stricken and unable to write since his wife's sudden death, novelist Mike Noonan retreats to the couple's Maine lake house — only to find it haunted, and himself drawn into a custody battle with deep, malevolent roots. Stephen King's most romantic ghost story.

A killer is torturing and murdering victims with terrible precision, and the clues suggest he is enacting the fantasies of three of the most notorious serial killers ever locked away in a Minnesota security hospital. To catch him, Lucas Davenport must consult the very monsters whose dreams the killer is making real.

When two small skeletons are unearthed beneath a demolished Minneapolis house, the bones reopen a case that has haunted Lucas Davenport since he was a young patrol cop — the disappearance of two girls he could never forget. Now, decades later, he gets a second chance to catch a killer he was sure got away.

Gary Soneji, the kidnapper from Along Came a Spider, escapes prison and launches a final campaign of revenge against Alex Cross — while across the Atlantic, FBI agent Thomas Pierce hunts a mutilation killer known only as Mr. Smith. Two manhunts converge in one of Patterson's most audacious thrillers.

A cold, brilliant professional killer takes a job for an obsessed lawyer who wants a rival dead — and when the hit spirals into a string of bodies, Lucas Davenport finds himself matched against one of the most formidable assassins he has ever faced. Clara Rinker kills without passion and without mistakes, and she does not intend to be caught.

A nerdy teenager falls obsessively in love with a rusted-out 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine — a car with a murderous will of its own. Stephen King turns adolescent longing and Detroit chrome into one of his most unsettling parables about possession.

Libby Day survived the massacre of her family when she was seven years old and testified that her teenage brother Ben was responsible. Twenty-five years later, a true crime enthusiast group called the Kill Club convinces her to reinvestigate — and what she uncovers suggests the conviction was built on a child's traumatized misremembering.

Vic Van Allen is the model suburban husband — except that he allows his wife Melinda to carry on a series of affairs openly, to prevent her from leaving him. When one of her lovers is found dead, Vic lets it be known that he killed him. He didn't — but the bluff establishes something. A portrait of suburban American life as a theatre of controlled violence, and one of Highsmith's most chilling studies in the psychology of a particular kind of man.

Accused of murdering her elderly employer, blunt Maine housekeeper Dolores Claiborne tells the whole truth — including the far older crime she really did commit. Stephen King delivers the entire novel as a single, unbroken first-person confession of astonishing power.

A brilliant, drug-addled pathologist and a charming, sociopathic actor strike a murderous bargain. As bodies turn up with their eyes destroyed, Lucas Davenport — himself sunk in a deep depression — must climb out of his own darkness to outthink a pair of killers as theatrical as they are deadly.

A obsessed fan murders a reclusive novelist for his unpublished notebooks, then buries the loot — until, decades later, a teenage boy unearths it, and a paroled killer comes hunting. Stephen King's literary-obsession thriller and the second Bill Hodges novel.

Andy McGee and his eight-year-old daughter Charlie are on the run from a shadowy government agency called The Shop after years of experiments have left Charlie with pyrokinetic abilities she can barely control. The more frightened Charlie becomes, the larger and less predictable her fires.

Six friends on a road trip to spring break. The RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere. A sniper pins them in place. Someone in the RV is the target — and someone knows who.

NYPD Detective Kat Donovan finds a dating website profile that appears to be her father — the man who went missing eighteen years ago. Following it leads her into something far darker than she expected.

Professional assassin Clara Rinker has retired to a quiet life in Mexico — until a hit meant for her kills her lover instead. Bent on vengeance against the people who tried to kill her, she returns to the United States on a one-woman war, and the FBI recruits Lucas Davenport, the one cop who truly understands her, to stop her.

At an airport bar, a chance encounter leads a narrator to spend hours with a former acquaintance who tells the story of saving a drowning stranger's life — and of what happened when that stranger became enormously successful.