Best Thriller Books

Private investigator Holly Gibney takes the case of a missing young woman and follows a trail to a pair of genteel, elderly academics hiding monstrous appetites in their basement. Stephen King gives his most beloved recurring heroine a chilling, twisty case of her own.

Two years after her famous-novelist husband's death, Lisey Landon must sort through his papers — and confront the secret, otherworldly place he visited in life, where wonder and horror wait side by side. Stephen King's most personal novel, and his own favorite.

What begins as a routine hunt for a bail-jumping debt collector turns horrifying when Lucas Davenport discovers the fugitive is a murderer — and worse, a cannibal who has buried his victims across the desert. The chase runs from Louisiana to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, with marshals Bob and Rae at Lucas's side.

Reacher finally reaches Virginia to meet the woman whose voice intrigued him, only to find himself arrested, framed, and told he may have a daughter. Lee Child's eighteenth Reacher thriller is a personal, fugitive-on-the-run story with unusually high emotional stakes.

A chain of small crises — a Saharan standoff, a Korean coup, a misread missile — drags the world's superpowers toward a nuclear war nobody wants. Ken Follett's standalone geopolitical thriller traces how good people and rational decisions can still spiral into catastrophe.

A meticulous predator stalks the Twin Cities, killing women and keeping grisly trophies, his crimes spanning years without ever drawing notice. Lucas Davenport joins forces with a fierce, terminally ill investigator determined to catch the killer before her own time runs out — a hunt that becomes as personal as it is urgent.

Alex Cross hunts a killer who treats murder as a game. Geoffrey Shafer, a British diplomat in Washington, plays a fantasy role-playing contest called The Four Horsemen, earning points for real killings — and when the hunt turns personal, Cross's own happiness becomes the prize.

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.

Mickey Haller has turned to freeing the wrongly convicted, and his investigator is none other than Harry Bosch. Their newest case: a woman serving life for killing her husband, a sheriff's deputy. As Bosch digs into the evidence and Haller prepares to overturn the conviction, they find powerful forces determined to keep the truth buried.

A charismatic small-town minister loses his faith after a tragedy and devotes his life to a dangerous obsession with 'secret electricity.' Decades later, his path keeps crossing that of a recovering addict — toward a finale of pure cosmic dread. Stephen King's Lovecraftian masterwork.

A group of wealthy tech vigilantes calling themselves 'the Five' begins murdering people they deem deserving of death — and announcing each killing online with self-righteous manifestos. Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces to stop a band of killers who believe they are doing the world a favor.

A string of bank robberies turns lethal when a meticulous mastermind kills hostages even after his instructions are followed to the letter. Alex Cross chases a criminal who plans every move with terrifying precision — and ends on a revelation that reshapes the series.

The killer Lucas Davenport thought he had stopped has resurfaced in New York City, leaving a trail of bodies in the urban shadows. Davenport travels east to help hunt him down — and is drawn into a second, separate investigation into a cabal of rogue cops who have decided to mete out their own brand of justice.

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.

A pre-dawn pharmacy robbery turns deadly, and the only witness who can identify the killers is Lucas Davenport's wife, Weather. As the robbers move to silence her before she can testify, Davenport finds himself in the most personal fight of his career — protecting the woman he loves from men with everything to lose.

When a bank robber is gunned down in a police operation, her ruthless husband swears revenge — not just on the cops who killed her, but on their families. As the killings begin, Lucas Davenport realizes the vendetta is being aided from inside the system, and that everyone he loves may be a target.

In 1997, still a major in the army's military police, Jack Reacher is sent undercover to a small Mississippi town to investigate a brutal murder near a secretive army base. What he uncovers — a cover-up that reaches high up the chain of command — will end his military career and set him on the road for good.

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.

William March's chilling 1954 classic of psychological horror. Christine Penmark slowly realizes that her perfect, charming eight-year-old daughter Rhoda may be a remorseless killer — and that the evil may be inherited. A landmark exploration of the 'born bad' child that shaped a genre.

Twenty years ago, during the chaos of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a Danish photojournalist was shot dead in an alley, her killing lost among hundreds of others. Now a bullet links her case to other crimes, and Harry Bosch finally has a thread to pull — the single piece of evidence that can explain a murder everyone else forgot.

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.

Two boyhood friends from a Mississippi coast immigrant community grow up on opposite sides of the law: one becomes a prosecutor, the other heir to a violent crime syndicate. Their collision in a Biloxi courtroom caps a sweeping saga of family, corruption, and vengeance.

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.