Best Thriller Books

A man shot ten years ago in a drive-by shooting finally dies of his wound — the bullet lodged too close to his spine to remove — making it a homicide a decade after the fact. Bosch and his new partner Lucia Soto must reconstruct a crime that the city has long since moved on from.

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway witnesses a lawyer's suicide and learns a dangerous secret — the location of a murdered Senator's body. Now the mob wants Mark dead, the federal government wants him as a witness, and Mark is too smart to trust either side. He hires his own lawyer: Reggie Love, a Memphis attorney who believes him.

Harry Bosch comes out of retirement to join the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit, working cold cases. His first assignment: the 1988 murder of sixteen-year-old Rebecca Verloren, whose case was buried in ways a DNA match on the murder weapon has just made impossible to ignore.

Harry Bosch is being sued for wrongful death by the family of a man he shot — a man he believed was the Dollmaker, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes. As the civil trial grinds forward, a new body surfaces with the Dollmaker's signature, suggesting Bosch may have killed the wrong man.

A trio of Nazi hunters — a war correspondent, a Soviet night-bomber, and a young Boston woman — track a female war criminal known as the Huntress across postwar Europe and America. Based on the all-female Night Witches regiment of the Soviet air force.

Detective Antoinette Conway and her partner Stephen Moran catch what looks like a routine domestic killing — but someone in the Murder Squad is pushing hard to close the case fast, and Conway can't tell who to trust.

Five years after Vicious, Victor Vale is still evading capture and hunting Eli, while a new ExtraOrdinary named Marcella Riggins rises with destruction at her fingertips and an agenda of her own. Three storylines converge in Schwab's expansion of the Villains universe — a world where everyone with powers has reasons to use them.

Victor Vale and Eli Ever were college roommates and best friends — until their thesis research on near-death experiences led them to discover how to grant humans extraordinary powers. Ten years later, Victor has escaped from prison with one goal: to find the man who put him there and kill him. A superhero story told from the villain's perspective.

Jack Reacher is accidentally grabbed off a Chicago street alongside a woman he barely knows — an FBI agent named Holly Johnson. Their kidnappers are a heavily armed militia group with a survivalist compound in Montana and a plan that amounts to mass murder. Reacher has no weapon, no help, and an 800-mile journey between him and the militia's endgame.

Hitchhiking through the Texas heat, Reacher accepts a ride from Carmen Greer — a woman fleeing an abusive husband who is due home from prison. By the time Reacher understands the full picture of the Greer family, the Echo County ranch, and the three hired killers heading for it, he is already too involved to walk away.

Pip Fitz-Amobi has promised herself she is done with murder investigations. Then a boy goes missing on the night of Little Kilton's memorial, and Pip finds herself drawn back into danger — this time broadcasting her investigation as a live podcast.

Leeds and Layla fall in love, but after a violent incident at a bed and breakfast leaves Layla with a changed personality, Leeds returns to the B&B alone. There he meets a ghost named Willow — and the situation becomes stranger and more morally complicated than he anticipated. Hoover's most genre-defying novel.

Hamburg, 1996. Reacher is pulled from his regular Army assignment and placed in a clandestine inter-agency team — the so-called night school — tasked with identifying an unknown buyer who is about to pay $100 million for something unknown. A prequel-in-spirit showing Reacher at his military peak.

Reacher decides to visit the New Hampshire town where his father was born — and finds no record of the Reacher family ever existing there. Simultaneously, a young Canadian couple becomes trapped at a remote motel where nothing is as it appears. A rare entry in the series that invites the reader to think about who Reacher really is.

A near-impossible sniper shot attempted against the French president — from 1,400 yards — points to one of four living marksmen, including Reacher's old adversary John Kott. Reacher is sent to Paris and London to find the shooter before a G8 summit becomes a killing ground.

Tom Ripley is insulted at a party by Jonathan Trevanny, a picture framer in Fontainebleau with a terminal blood disease, and decides to arrange a small act of vengeance: he has Jonathan recruited, through an intermediary, to carry out a Mafia killing on a train. Jonathan, desperate for money for his family, agrees — and Ripley watches, and then becomes involved in ways he didn't plan. Widely considered the best novel in the Ripley series.

Minneapolis detective Lucas Davenport hunts a serial killer who is following his own macabre rules — a game of cat and mouse that introduces one of crime fiction's most enduring protagonists.

On the anniversary of his wife's murder, paediatrician David Beck receives an email that appears to be from Elizabeth — dead for eight years. Then a video surfaces of a woman who looks exactly like her. Then the FBI arrives with questions.

LAPD detective Harry Bosch investigates the murder of a Vietnam veteran found dead in a drainpipe in the Hollywood Hills — and discovers a trail leading to a daring bank heist tied to the tunnels both men once crawled through in the war.

Johnny Smith wakes from a four-year coma to discover he has psychic powers — a touch reveals things about people and events. When he shakes the hand of a rising politician and sees a future of nuclear catastrophe, Johnny faces the most impossible moral question: is it right to kill one person to prevent mass destruction?

1634. A merchant ship departs Batavia for Amsterdam carrying a disgraced detective, his bodyguard, a mysterious prisoner, and a demon that appears to be killing the passengers. Samuel Pipps must solve an impossible mystery from the ship's hold while his bodyguard Arent Hayes investigates on deck above. Turton's locked-room mystery at sea.

A woman disappears from a container ship. Her half-brother tends bar at a remote hotel on Vancouver Island. A financier runs a Ponzi scheme that will destroy hundreds of lives. Mandel's companion novel to Station Eleven weaves together haunted characters across a story of fraud, ghosts, and the way money makes certain people invisible.

The third Housemaid novel follows Millie Calloway into a new domestic situation — a family with secrets that rival any she has encountered before. As Millie uncovers the truth about the Calloway household, she finds herself in danger of becoming the victim rather than the survivor, with a child's life tangled in the web.

Children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities are abducted from their homes and taken to a facility in rural Maine called The Institute, where their gifts are exploited for purposes they cannot initially understand. Twelve-year-old Luke Ellis, gifted beyond any previous subject, becomes the unlikely center of a resistance.