Best Thriller Books

Three schoolteachers vanish on their way home, and one turns up dead. Meanwhile a witness insists she has seen a man who should not exist: a Serbian war criminal long believed dead, now walking the streets of San Francisco. Lindsay Boxer and Joe pursue two hauntings of the present and the past.

As San Francisco prepares for the holidays, a whisper reaches the police: a criminal mastermind known only as Loman is planning something enormous for Christmas. With the clock ticking toward the big day, Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club race to uncover a plot that keeps shifting shape.

On a single morning, drug kingpins are gunned down by snipers in three different cities at once. As Lindsay Boxer works the San Francisco killing and Cindy Thomas chases the story nationwide, the club uncovers a coordinated network of vigilante assassins — and a moral question with no easy answer.

Detective Lindsay Boxer leads the Women's Murder Club into the high-profile murder investigation of a wealthy San Francisco couple, a case that draws intense scrutiny and personal danger. As the pressure mounts, the question is whether Lindsay, Cindy, Claire, and Yuki will all be standing when it's over.

A glittering San Francisco socialite couple is found dead with no apparent cause — no wound, no poison the lab can name. As Lindsay Boxer chases a killer who leaves no trace, Cindy Thomas pursues a story everyone else ignores: the murder of a beloved homeless street preacher known as Bagman Jesus.

Fifteen years after fleeing the mob-run firm, Mitch McDeere is a partner at the world's largest law firm in New York. A complex international case in Libya turns lethal when a colleague is kidnapped and a colossal ransom is demanded, plunging Mitch into a global nightmare.

An overworked public defender gets a tip that turns him into a mass-tort superstar overnight, filing class actions against pharmaceutical giants and reaping staggering fees. As the private jets and mansions pile up, Clay Carter learns how quickly easy money curdles into a trap.

A doctor is found executed at a scenic overlook above Los Angeles, and the discovery that he had access to radioactive cesium turns a murder into a potential terrorism crisis overnight. Harry Bosch must solve the case before federal agents take it over — and before the missing material can be used to kill thousands.

Days before his long-awaited wedding to Mary Catherine, Michael Bennett's life is upended by a series of grisly murders that announce the arrival of a methodical assassin known only as the Russian. As the killings mount, Bennett must hunt a ghost — and protect the future he has finally let himself imagine.

A law professor returns to his Mississippi hometown at his dying father's summons and finds three million dollars in unexplained cash hidden in the old judge's study. The discovery forces an agonizing choice between honesty, family loyalty, and the simplest temptation of all: keeping quiet.

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.

A killer is recreating New York's most infamous murders, staging copycat crimes that pay homage to the city's darkest history. With a family vacation shattered and the body count rising, Michael Bennett must decode the pattern — and reckon with FBI agent Emily Parker — before the killer's grand finale.

People are dying horribly after eating tainted fast food, an act of terror with no obvious motive, just as a killer from Lindsay Boxer's past resurfaces with a personal grudge. Then a honeymoon cruise turns into a trap, and the Women's Murder Club faces danger on more than one front.

On a deserted road near the Arizona-Mexico border, Jack Reacher meets Michaela Fenton, a former army investigator hunting for her missing twin brother. Their search leads to a secretive operation run by an elusive figure named Dendoncker — and to a fight Reacher has no intention of walking away from.

Home in New York and back at Manhattan North Homicide, Michael Bennett catches a case that begins with reports of a grotesque occult ritual and a burned body. As he digs, the trail leads into a hidden world of the wealthy and depraved, where money buys the freedom to indulge the darkest appetites.

The massacre of a family Alex Cross once loved sends him chasing a brutal warlord known as the Tiger — a trail that leads off the streets of Washington and into the war-torn heart of West Africa, where Cross faces child soldiers, corruption, and a brand of violence beyond anything he has known.

Burned out and in need of a break, Michael Bennett takes his family to a quiet town in Maine — and walks straight into a wave of drug-fueled violence the locals would rather keep buried. As bodies pile up and no one will talk, Bennett finds his vacation turning into the most isolating case of his career.

In 1992, a string of suspicious deaths links men who once shared a dangerous government secret. Major Jack Reacher is assigned to a secretive interagency task force to investigate — but the deeper he digs, the clearer it becomes that someone powerful wants the past to stay buried, whatever the cost.

Michael Crichton's satirical thriller weaves together multiple storylines involving biotech corporations, genetic patents, talking transgenic animals, and the researchers, lawyers, and patients caught in the commercialization of the human genome. It is a darkly comedic indictment of an industry racing ahead of its own ethics.

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.