Best Thriller Books

Thierry Mulch has Alex Cross's entire family — Bree, Nana Mama, and the children — and forces Cross to dance to his commands or watch them die. Desperate and half-broken, Cross must obey a madman's escalating demands while racing to find the people he loves before it's too late.

After Michael Bennett helps capture a ruthless South American crime lord, the man swears vengeance from his cell — and makes good on it. With his family in danger, Bennett flees the city for a small town upstate, but his enemy's reach is long, and the war he has started will not stay behind him.

A town in the Nevada desert is wiped off the map as a demonstration of power, and a mastermind threatens to destroy the world's great cities unless he is paid billions. Alex Cross joins forces with MI6 and Interpol to stop the Wolf — and the returning Weasel — in a globe-spanning race against catastrophe.

A killer who signs emails 'Mary Smith' is murdering Hollywood stars and sending taunting accounts of each crime to a celebrity reporter. Alex Cross, pulled from a family vacation, hunts a murderer whose motive proves more painful and personal than the glamorous victims suggest.

A wealthy woman's daughter vanishes, and soon young people in the Twin Cities Goth scene begin turning up dead. The only witness describes a shadowy figure no one else can find — a phantom. Lucas Davenport must determine whether the killer is real, imagined, or something stranger still.

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.

A meticulous killer who calls himself the Teacher is murdering New York's rich and entitled, punishing the rude and the privileged in a campaign of class rage. Detective Michael Bennett must stop him before the lessons turn into a citywide bloodbath — all while raising ten children at home.

Women Jack Reacher once knew in the army are turning up dead — no wounds, no poison, no cause of death the experts can name, just a chilling signature. When the FBI's profile of the killer points squarely at Reacher himself, he must catch the real murderer to clear his own name.

Patients are dying at a San Francisco hospital under circumstances that look less like misfortune than murder, each death marked by a strange symbolic token. As Lindsay Boxer hunts a killer hiding behind a white coat, Yuki Castellano fights a wrenching malpractice trial with the hospital — and the truth — on the line.

A gunman opens fire on a crowded San Francisco commuter ferry, and one of the wounded is someone Lindsay Boxer loves. As the club races to understand the shooter, a separate horror unfolds: children are vanishing from wealthy neighborhoods, taken by someone who knows exactly how to disappear.

A killer is murdering young mothers and their children in San Francisco parking garages, terrorizing the city. At the same time, a brazen jewel thief is robbing the rich and famous — and the two cases pull Lindsay Boxer in directions that test her judgment, and Yuki's, to the breaking point.

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.

Alex Cross's first case as an FBI agent pits him against the Wolf, a Russian crime lord running a business that abducts people to order and sells them to the highest bidder. As Cross learns the Bureau's ropes, a custody battle over his youngest son threatens the family he is fighting to protect.

Three disgraced former judges run a blackmail scam from inside a Florida prison, extorting closeted, wealthy men through fake letters. When one of their marks turns out to be a CIA-backed presidential candidate, their petty hustle collides with the most ruthless power players in Washington.

A string of murders — a federal judge, a lawyer, others who should have had nothing in common — draws Alex Cross and John Sampson into a conspiracy that reaches toward the highest levels of power. As Cross weighs a life-changing career decision, a familiar shadow returns to test him one more time.

An investigator for the agency that polices judicial misconduct receives a chilling tip: a sitting Florida judge is a meticulous serial killer who has eluded detection for years. As Lacy Stoltz digs into his hidden list of victims, she realizes her own name may be added to it.

In 2005, a young archaeologist discovers two skeletons and an ancient ring near Carcassonne; in 1209, a young woman becomes the guardian of three books containing the secret of the Holy Grail during the brutal Cathar Crusade — two women separated by eight centuries but bound by the same ancient mystery.

Brad Thor's seventh Scot Harvath thriller. Counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath races across Europe and the Middle East to recover a lost secret about the origins of Islam — a revelation powerful enough to change history, and one that ruthless enemies will kill to keep buried.

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.

A Cambridge group therapist becomes obsessed with a charismatic Greek Tragedy professor she suspects of murder, convinced he is connected to the ritualistic killings of young women who belong to his secret society — The Maidens.

A killer is murdering entire families in their homes, vanishing without a trace, and the press has dubbed him the most meticulous murderer in history. As Alex Cross hunts him, a celebrated true-crime writer who has made Cross his subject inserts himself into the investigation — with an agenda of his own.

Cassie Black, an ex-convict trying to go straight, agrees to one last high-stakes heist in Las Vegas — the score that will fund a new life and let her reclaim the daughter she gave up. But the job goes wrong, and a ruthless fixer is dispatched to recover what she took, hunting her across the desert in a deadly cat-and-mouse.

A kidnapper is abducting the children of New York's wealthiest families and quizzing them on the suffering of the poor — and when they fail his lessons in inequality, they die. Detective Michael Bennett and FBI agent Emily Parker race to stop a killer who has turned class guilt into a death sentence.

Newly married, Lindsay Boxer barely has time for a honeymoon before a newborn baby vanishes and a terrified teenager stands accused. As Lindsay races to find the missing child, Yuki prosecutes a brutal assault case and Lindsay's own marriage is tested by the relentless pull of the job.