Best Thriller Books

Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates the decades-old disappearance of a wealthy family's niece, partnering with the brilliant and deeply damaged Lisbeth Salander.

When a stranger leaves his entire fortune to seventeen-year-old Avery Grambs, she must move into his mansion and solve a series of puzzles to uncover why.

A young mother and her boyfriend vanish after a night out, a note is found with a cryptic clue, and the rural English countryside hides more than a missing persons case.

When two Supreme Court justices are assassinated in one night, law student Darby Shaw writes a speculative legal brief identifying a likely suspect — a powerful oil baron with everything to lose. The brief reaches the wrong hands, and suddenly Darby is running for her life.

A criminal psychotherapist becomes obsessed with uncovering why a famous painter shot her husband five times in the face and has not spoken a single word since.

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army narrates his journey from the fall of Saigon through Los Angeles exile to reeducation camp, examining what it means to be perpetually between worlds.

San Francisco detective Lindsay Boxer, recently diagnosed with a blood disease, teams up with a journalist, an assistant DA, and a medical examiner to catch a serial killer targeting newlywed couples. The first Women's Murder Club novel launched a beloved second Patterson series.

Grace and Jack Angel appear to have the perfect marriage, but behind their elegant facade lies a nightmare of control, captivity, and carefully maintained appearances.

A woman inherits a Chelsea townhouse on her twenty-fifth birthday and discovers a mystery inside: three dead bodies were found there when she was a baby, and the house holds secrets about the cult that destroyed two families.

A glamorous wedding on a remote Irish island turns deadly, and the assembled guests all have reason to wish the groom harm.

Millie Calloway returns as a housemaid in a new household where she suspects her employer is in danger — but the situation is far more complicated and deadly than it first appears.

A struggling novelist steals a dead student's book idea — a plot so good it guarantees a bestseller — only to find that someone knows exactly what he did.

A darkly twisting psychological thriller in which a struggling writer discovers a disturbing manuscript hidden in the home of a bestselling author.

Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre, examining her own culpability and the nature of maternal ambivalence.

The origin story of John Kelly — who will become John Clark, Jack Ryan's right-hand operative — set during the Vietnam War. A grieving Navy SEAL wages a one-man war against a Baltimore drug ring while simultaneously being recruited for a secret POW rescue mission in North Vietnam.

A white female author steals the unfinished manuscript of her Chinese-American friend who has just died, publishes it as her own, and watches her carefully constructed lies unravel as the internet closes in.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon races through Rome to stop the Illuminati from destroying Vatican City with an antimatter bomb as a new Pope is being elected.

A physics professor is kidnapped, wakes up in a version of his life where he made different choices, and must navigate a multiverse of parallel worlds to find his way back to the family he loves.

Jack Ryan has become National Security Advisor when a trade war with Japan escalates into economic warfare and then military conflict in the Pacific. The novel that introduced the concept of a coordinated attack on financial infrastructure, and that ends with an act of terrorism that presaged 9/11.

Tom Clancy's sprawling thriller picks up where Debt of Honor ended. After a catastrophe wipes out most of the U.S. government, Jack Ryan is suddenly president, and must rebuild the nation while facing simultaneous crises — a bioterror attack, a Middle Eastern war, and enemies foreign and domestic.

Lara is trained from birth to be a spy-bride sent to destroy the Bridge Kingdom from within, but when she arrives she must choose between the mission she was raised for and the truth she discovers.

A woman with a hidden past takes a housemaid position with a wealthy family and discovers that the picture-perfect household conceals something deeply sinister.

A group of Oxford friends gather for their annual New Year's holiday in a remote Scottish hunting lodge, and one of them doesn't survive.

Hannah Hall's husband Owen vanishes the same day a massive fraud investigation erupts at his company, leaving behind only a note reading 'Protect her' — a directive aimed at his teenage daughter Bailey, a stepdaughter who has never warmed to Hannah and who may know more about Owen's secrets than she has let on.