Editors Reads

Best Thriller Books

68 expert-reviewed books — page 3 of 3

The Company of Strangers book cover

The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

4.0

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.

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The Glass Cell book cover

The Glass Cell

by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

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.

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The Silent and the Damned book cover
4.0

Falcón is called to investigate a domestic murder-suicide in a Seville suburb — a prominent businessman apparently shot his wife and then himself. The investigation reveals the case is far more complex, pulling Falcón into the world of Seville's wealthy elite and the corruption that underlies the city's surface prosperity. The third Falcón novel deepens the detective's psychological portrait while delivering Wilson's most tightly plotted thriller.

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The Tremor of Forgery book cover

The Tremor of Forgery

by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

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.

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The Two Faces of January book cover

The Two Faces of January

by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

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.

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This Sweet Sickness book cover

This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

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.

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A Darkening Stain book cover

A Darkening Stain

by Robert Wilson

3.9

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.

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Instruments of Darkness book cover

Instruments of Darkness

by Robert Wilson

3.9

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.

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The Big Killing book cover

The Big Killing

by Robert Wilson

3.9

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.

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The Boy Who Followed Ripley book cover

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

3.9

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.

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The Cry of the Owl book cover

The Cry of the Owl

by Patricia Highsmith

3.9

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.

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The Godfather of Kathmandu book cover
3.9

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.

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Those Who Walk Away book cover

Those Who Walk Away

by Patricia Highsmith

3.9

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.

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Vulture Peak book cover

Vulture Peak

by John Burdett

3.9

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.

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Ripley Under Water book cover

Ripley Under Water

by Patricia Highsmith

3.8

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.

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The Bangkok Asset book cover

The Bangkok Asset

by John Burdett

3.8

Sonchai encounters a man of extraordinary physical capability — an American military asset, a product of a black-ops enhancement programme — whose presence in Bangkok is connected to CIA operations that go back to the Vietnam War and forward into a disturbing future of human augmentation. The sixth Sonchai novel, the darkest and most politically charged.

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The Lost Symbol book cover

The Lost Symbol

by Dan Brown

3.8

Robert Langdon is called to Washington D.C. under false pretenses and plunged into a frantic one-night race through the Capitol's corridors of power. Freemason symbolism, Ancient Mysteries, and a villain whose identity reshapes the entire narrative — Brown's most American thriller.

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Inferno book cover

Inferno

by Dan Brown

3.7

Robert Langdon wakes in a Florence hospital with no memory of the past two days and an assassin on his trail. Racing through the art-filled corridors of Florence, Venice, and Istanbul, he follows clues embedded in Dante's Inferno to unravel a plot with implications for the entire human species.

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The Tesseract book cover

The Tesseract

by Alex Garland

3.7

Three interconnected narratives in Manila — a British drug dealer, a Filipino family, and a psychologist — converge in a single violent night. Garland's second novel, more structurally ambitious than The Beach.

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Vox book cover

Vox

by Christina Dalcher

3.5

In a near-future America where women are restricted to 100 words per day by government-issued wrist counters, neurolinguist Dr. Jean McClellan must rediscover her voice when the regime suddenly needs her expertise.

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