Best Thriller Books

Toby, charming and fortunate, wakes up in his cousin's home after a violent attack that has left him changed. When a skull is found in the wych elm in the garden, Toby becomes entangled in a decades-old death — and begins to question everything he believed about himself and his family.

David Kelsey maintains a double life: during the week he lives in a boarding house and works as a chemist; on weekends he retreats to a house he has secretly bought and furnished for a woman named Annabelle — who doesn't love him and has married someone else. A study in erotic obsession so complete that the obsessive has replaced reality with a private fiction. One of Highsmith's most psychologically acute portraits of a particular masculine pathology.

An invisible, impenetrable dome descends without warning on the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine, sealing it off from the outside world. As resources dwindle and communication with the exterior becomes impossible, the town's worst political instincts emerge with terrifying speed.

The fourth and final Bruce Medway novel, returning to Benin — where the series began — as Medway investigates a brutal murder connected to the region's vodoun culture and its underworld of ritual and violence. A fitting close to the West African series, darker and more interior than the earlier books.

Two shapeshifting alien entities — one benign, one predatory — have lived on Earth for millions of years, each gradually learning to pass as human. A mysterious artifact discovered on the ocean floor draws them both toward the same location.

The first Bruce Medway novel, introducing the fixer and sometime investigator who operates in West Africa's underworld of corrupt business, smuggling, and sudden violence. Medway is hired to find a missing German businessman in Benin — a job that quickly becomes far more dangerous than advertised. The first of four West African thrillers that established Robert Wilson's reputation before the Falcón series.

Nine stressed, broken, or otherwise lost people arrive at Tranquillum House — a boutique wellness retreat run by the enigmatic Masha. Over ten days, Masha's radical approach to healing crosses lines they didn't know existed. A satirical thriller about the wellness industry, grief, and what people will try when conventional living has failed them.

Jamaica, 1665: privateer Captain Edward Hunter assembles a crew to raid the heavily fortified Spanish galleon El Trinidad, moored at Matanceros under the guns of a famously cruel Spanish commander. Published posthumously from a completed manuscript found on Crichton's computer after his death.

Three storylines converge around a mysterious shipping container in post-9/11 America: a journalist investigating locative art, a drug-addicted translator working for a shadowy operative, and a Cuban-Chinese crime family tracking the same cargo.

Bruce Medway takes on a job in Ivory Coast that involves a dead American, a missing consignment of weapons-grade materials, and the fractious politics of West African civil conflict. The second Medway novel deepens the portrait of the region's corruption and violence while sending its protagonist deeper into danger than the first book managed.

A sixteen-year-old American boy, Frank Pierson, appears at Tom Ripley's door in France claiming to have pushed his wheelchair-bound millionaire father off a cliff. Ripley, intrigued, takes the boy under his wing and accompanies him to Berlin — where they attend transvestite clubs in West Berlin, encounter kidnappers, and where Ripley must decide how much he cares about what happens to this strange, guilty young man.

Robert Forester has been watching a young woman, Jenny, through her kitchen window each evening — not prurient but drawn to the warmth of her domestic life, which contrasts with his disintegrating own. When Jenny discovers him, she is not frightened — she is fascinated. The novel spirals into false accusation, murder, and the complete unravelling of social reality as everyone around Robert becomes convinced he is responsible for things he didn't do.

A foreign film director is found dead in a luxury Bangkok hotel. Sonchai's investigation leads him to the heroin trade, a Tibetan Buddhist master in Kathmandu who is also a drug lord, and a meditation on the nature of attachment — the root of suffering in Buddhist teaching, and also the engine of the drug trade. The fourth Sonchai novel, expanding the series to Nepal.

Six years after the catastrophe at Jurassic Park, mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm joins a covert expedition to Isla Sorna — Site B — where InGen's dinosaurs have been breeding and evolving without human interference. What they find there is far more dangerous than anyone anticipated.

A morbidly obese lawyer accidentally kills an old Romani woman with his car and receives a single word from her ancient father — 'thinner' — triggering an unstoppable supernatural curse that begins to consume him.

Ray Garrett's wife has died — a probable suicide — and her father, Ed Coleman, blames Ray and has tried to shoot him in Rome. The novel follows the two men as they circle each other through Venice and its islands — Coleman hunting Ray, Ray unable to leave, drawn back to a man who wants to kill him in a city that seems to conspire with grief.

Sonchai is sent to Dubai and beyond to investigate a human organ-trafficking operation — the harvesting and sale of kidneys, corneas, and hearts from the living poor to the wealthy dying. The fifth Sonchai novel takes the series global, from Bangkok to Shanghai to Dubai, asking what Buddhist teachings have to say about the commodification of the human body.

A young man is found dead on a houseboat in London. Three women — each damaged, each with a connection to the dead man — become suspects in an investigation that reaches back through years of loss and resentment.

Danny, an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant cleaning houses in Sydney, recognises that a client of one of his regular houses may know something about a murder — and spends a single day deciding whether to go to the police, knowing that doing so will mean deportation.

Jazz Bashara is a porter and small-time smuggler in Artemis — humanity's first and only city on the Moon. When she's offered an opportunity to pull off a corporate heist that could solve her financial problems permanently, she discovers the job connects to a conspiracy that threatens the entire lunar colony.

A New Zealand guerrilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood begins farming unused land without permission; when their activities bring them into contact with a reclusive American tech billionaire with interests in the land, the collision between their idealism and his power becomes increasingly dangerous.

A picnic in the Chilterns is interrupted when a hot-air balloon accident brings two strangers together. One of them — Joe Rose, a science journalist — becomes the obsessive focus of the other's deranged love. McEwan's clinical thriller dissects the boundary between reason and madness.

The origin story of Hannibal Lecter: from his aristocratic Lithuanian childhood through the traumatic events of the Second World War that broke something fundamental, to the first murders in post-war Europe and Japan. A prequel that traces the specific losses and grievances that created the most celebrated fictional cannibal.

The fifth and final Ripley novel. An American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, move to the village near Ripley's Belle Ombre and begin investigating the disappearance of Dickie Greenleaf — whose killing, thirty years earlier, is the foundational crime of the entire series. Ripley must manage this threat with the same composure he has brought to every crisis, in a novel that is both a thriller and a late meditation on how long a constructed life can hold.