The Best Thrillers of All Time

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there … After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive — and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

Tragedy strikes a Native community when the Hill family’s handsome seventeen-year-old son, Jimmy, mysteriously vanishes at sea. Left behind to cope during the search-and-rescue effort is his sister, Lisamarie, a wayward teenager with a dark secret. She sets off alone in search of Jimmy through the Douglas Channel and heads for Monkey Beach — a shore famed for its sasquatch sightings. Infused by turns with darkness and humor, Monkey Beach is a spellbinding voyage into the long, cool shadows of B.C.’s Coast Mountains, blending teen culture, Haisla lore, nature spirits, and human tenderness into a multi-layered story of loss and redemption.

Patricia Highsmith was a master of macabre scenarios and the grand dame of the psychological thriller. In Tom Ripley, she created one of literature’s most fascinating characters — charming, intelligent, utterly ruthless, and amoral. Throughout five novels, beginning with The Talented Mr. Ripley, she built a character completely without a conscience and unnervingly sympathetic. The Talented Mr. Ripley is equal parts a subtle character study and an edge-of-your-seat exercise in sinister thrills.

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are investigating a brutal murder with dire implications. Meanwhile, Jane’s intrepid mother, Angela, is looking into a mystery of her own. With so much happening on their case, Jane and Maura already struggle to see the forest for the trees, but will they lose sight of something sinister happening much closer to home?

John Grisham returns to Mississippi with the riveting story of two sons of immigrant families who grow up as friends, but ultimately find themselves on opposite sides of the law. Grisham’s trademark twists and turns will keep you tearing through the pages until the stunning conclusion.

Gillian Flynn has made a name for herself with incredibly dark, twisting narratives centered on complex, seemingly unsympathetic female characters. With Gone Girl, Flynn brought readers deep inside a narrative hall of mirrors — a slow burn, noir-tinged maze built to keep the reader constantly off-balance. The story of Nick and Amy’s courtship, crumbling marriage, and Amy’s eventual disappearance is an extraordinary exercise in literary sleight-of-hand. It’s nearly impossible to put down until the final devastating page.

A young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful — until other women in the village start asking for her help getting rid of their own husbands … What happens next sets in motion a chain of events that will change everything. Filled with clever criminals, second chances, and wry and witty women, Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens is a razor-sharp debut of humor and heart that readers won’t soon forget.

A domestic suspense debut about a young couple and their apparently friendly neighbors — a twisty, roller coaster ride of lies, betrayal, and the secrets between husbands and wives … Another thrilling domestic suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Not a Happy Family.

Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning Out follows the intersecting lives of four women who work the night shift together at a factory in Tokyo where they assemble boxed lunches. The women become more than coworkers when Yayoi, the youngest of the four, seeks out their help after she murders her abusive, compulsive gambler of a husband. Together the women cut up and dispose of Yayoi’s husband’s corpse, a gruesome act that seals their bond with each other. By covering up Yayoi’s crime, their bloodstained solidarity gradually turns the group into accidental vigilantes as they struggle to navigate life in a city dominated by the patriarchy’s grip. Kirino’s Out is an ominous snapshot of trauma, vengeance, and survival.

Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: The favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood and the best way to move a body. Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.

“A heartwarming mystery with a lovable oddball at its center” (Real Simple), this cozy whodunit introduces a one-of-a-kind heroine who will steal your heart.

A young Black girl goes missing in the woods outside her white rust belt town. But she’s not the first — and she may not be the last. It’s watching. It’s taking. It’s your turn…

Published posthumously, Toni Cade Bambara’s final novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, is described as her magnum opus by her editor and close friend Toni Morrison. Inspired by the tragic rampage of Atlanta serial killer Wayne Williams — who James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen also examines — Those Bones Are Not My Child unfolds with the disappearance of a twelve-year-old boy and his mother’s tireless search to find him. Throughout the pages of the novel, Bambara envelops readers into the mindset of a community turned upside down by violence and grief.

Told in alternating voices, The Silent Wife is about a marriage in the throes of dissolution, a couple headed for catastrophe, concessions that can’t be made, and promises that won’t be kept. Expertly plotted and reminiscent of Gone Girl and These Things Hidden, The Silent Wife ensnares the reader from page one and does not let go.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: A dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film — and awakens one woman’s hidden powers.

Discover the “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) debut novel that “announces the arrival of a literary supernova” (The New York Times Book Review), “a drama of childhood that is as wild as it is intimate” (Chigozie Obioma). Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly imagined, and a triumph of suspense. It captures the fierce warmth, resilience, and bravery that can emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader headlong into a community that, once encountered, is impossible to forget.

A “mind-blowing” (Entertainment Weekly) speculative thriller about an ordinary man who awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew — from the author of Upgrade, Recursion, and the Wayward Pines trilogy.

While Carrie and Salem’s Lot introduced Stephen King as a writer to watch, The Shining firmly situated him as one of his generation’s preeminent voices in horror literature. The Shining was King’s first hardcover bestseller and it made him the household name he is today. King’s story of a troubled man’s slow descent into madness while serving as the winter caretaker of an isolated and haunted hotel makes The Shining a truly unsettling, unforgettable thriller.

Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise — undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world — when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather’s heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world.

Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress trying to escape a streak of bad press, has retreated to the peace and quiet of her family’s lake house in Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and several bottles of bourbon, she passes the time watching Tom and Katherine Royce, the glamorous couple living in the house across the lake. They make for good viewing. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s more to the story than meets the eye — and that shocking secrets can lurk beneath the most placid of surfaces. Packed with sharp characters, psychological suspense, and gasp-worthy plot twists, Riley Sager’s The House Across the Lake is the ultimate escapist read … no lake house required.

The emotionally fraught Rachel Watson wrestles with her obsessive feelings for her ex-husband. As she tries to heal after their relationship dissolves, Rachel manages to sift through her thoughts and fears during her daily train commute from Oxfordshire to London. Each day during the trek, the train passes the house she used to live in with her ex. In an attempt to distract herself from the reality of their separation, Rachel shifts her attention to a home she can see from the train, occupied by a man and a woman who she imagines are happy and deeply in love. When the woman goes missing and her disappearance becomes fodder for the local tabloids, Rachel’s life is turned upside down.

When Laurel Eastabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photos he won’t let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret — a story that leads her far from her old life, and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her … From the bestselling author of The Flight Attendant, here is a gripping psychological novel of obsession and consequences.

Chester Himes’s Harlem Detective series has proven to be a groundbreaking piece of hard-boiled noir fiction — and it all started with A Rage in Harlem. Set in a Harlem that at once feels larger-than-life and authentic, A Rage in Harlem introduces Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones to a rough and tumble world of grifters, prostitutes, and dangerous vendettas. It’s a landmark piece of crime fiction that put Chester Himes in the company of names like James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler.

In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: A time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.

Published in 1938, Daphne du Maurier’s romantic thriller Rebecca has never gone out of print. A bestseller in its day and beyond, spawning a film adaptation by none other than the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca takes inspiration from one of the greatest novels in the English language, Jane Eyre. A nameless narrator has married a European playboy and moved into his vast manse. But she finds herself haunted by the memory of his dead wife, Rebecca, and her still very loyal servant, Mrs. Danvers.

It was a senselessly violent crime: On a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck … From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the first riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series.

When considering the thriller as literature, The Big Sleep should be one of your first destinations. Not only does it serve as the debut of hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe, it showcases Chandler’s ruthless economy with words, wringing the maximum amount of tension and atmosphere from the sparsest descriptions. The title (a euphemism for death) couldn’t be more misleading — once you begin, you’re barely going to blink until you’ve turned the last page.

In the book The Handmaiden, directed by Park Chan-wook was based on, Sue Trinder is an orphan. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives — Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways … but no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

Celeste Ng’s New York Times bestseller begins with the death of Lydia Lee, the beloved daughter of a multiracial Chinese-American family from a suburban town in 1970s Ohio. When Lydia’s body turns up in a lake, her family is left to reckon with the loss of a daughter who they hoped would fulfill all of their dreams. Through the lens of Ng’s masterful storytelling, Everything I Never Told You captures a family faced with the realization that the daughter they loved so deeply lived a life filled with secrets. Beautifully written and undeniably moving, Ng’s novel is as suspenseful as it is perceptive.

In the Woods introduced readers to the detectives of the Dublin Murder Squad, as well as the nuanced and emotionally resonant thrills of Tana French. The story follows Detective Rob Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox as they investigate a bizarre murder with disturbing similarities to a horrifying event from Ryan’s past. It is an atmospheric, ingenious, and unflinchingly bleak thriller that’s sure to keep readers guessing until the final reveal.

Paloma decides to sublet the second bedroom of her overpriced San Francisco apartment to Arun, who recently moved from India. Paloma has to admit, it feels good helping someone find their way in America — that is until Arun discovers Paloma’s darkest secret, one that could jeopardize her own fragile place in this country. Before Paloma can pay Arun off, she finds him face down in a pool of blood. She flees the apartment but by the time the police arrive, there’s no body — and no evidence that Arun ever even existed in the first place. Did Paloma’s secret die with Arun or is she now in greater danger than ever before?

The discovery of a girl abandoned by the side of the road threatens to unearth the long-buried secrets of a Texas town’s legendary cold case in this superb, atmospheric novel from the internationally bestselling author of Black-Eyed Susans.

While Nordic noir existed long before the late Stieg Larsson introduced the world to a misanthropic hacker named Lisbeth Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo brought the genre to an international audience in a way few others have. It is a bleak and labyrinthine exploration of a decades-old missing person’s case, long-held familial secrets, and the damaged psyche of one of the most fascinating heroines in recent memory.

A young “national model worker,” renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal. As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political forces that have guided his life since birth. Chen must tiptoe around his superiors if he wants to get to the bottom of this crime, and risk his career — perhaps even his life — to see justice done.

Anyone who’s ever been to Vegas knows what a different world awaits once you step off the strip. Abani’s novel plays upon the reader’s dreams of the desert city, constantly shifting locations and perspectives to tell a sordid story about lives and histories spiraling far outside the mainstream, leaving investigators with a trail of horrifying murders to study. Those who prefer a revenge plot will find plenty to salivate over, but none of it would fly without Abani’s knack for convincing, utterly unusual characters.

When Myriam decides to return to work as a lawyer after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their son and daughter. They never dreamed they would find Louise: A quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau. Building tension with every page, The Perfect Nanny is a compulsive, riveting, bravely observed exploration of power, class, race, domesticity, motherhood, and madness.

One of Japan’s great modern masters, Kaoru Takamura, makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus. Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: Kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers.

The Shadow of the Wind incorporates a host of elements that could each sustain a thrilling read: A young man caught up in a conspiracy he barely understands, an investigation of a mysterious death decades later, and the horrific authoritarianism of Franco-era Spain. Here, all of them are interwoven with the history of a mysterious novel — one that obsesses some and drives others to murder.

Introducing Detective Inspector Darko Dawson: Dedicated family man, rebel in the office, ace in the field — and one of the most appealing sleuths to come along in years. In a shady grove outside the small town of Ketanu, a young woman — a promising medical student — has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. Dawson is fluent in Ketanu’s indigenous language, so he’s the right man for the job, but the local police are less than thrilled with an outsider’s interference. Delving deeper into the student’s haunting death, Dawson will uncover long-buried secrets that, to his surprise, hit much too close to home.

John le Carré is truly in a class of his own. His densely-plotted spy fiction essentially reinvented the genre, largely due to le Carré’s own experiences working as spy and intelligence agent. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold launched le Carré’s career as an internationally bestselling author — and brought his intelligence career to an end. It also introduced readers to George Smiley, an unassuming and methodical man as far removed from the likes of James Bond as one could imagine. With its twisting narrative, duplicitous machinations, and devastating conclusion, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold remains the standard against which all other espionage fiction is measured.

A series of misfortunes plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos, unknowingly propelling them into one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history. As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains.

A fantastical crime novel set in an alternate Seoul where assassination guilds compete for market dominance. Crackling with action and filled with unforgettable characters, The Plotters is a deeply entertaining thriller that soars with the soul, wit, and lyricism of real literary craft.

Yu-jin discovers his mother’s murdered body at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex. He can’t remember much about the night before; having suffered from seizures for most of his life, Yu-jin often has trouble with his memory. All he has is a faint impression of his mother calling his name. But was she calling for help? Or begging for her life? Thus begins Yu-jin’s frantic three-day search to uncover what happened that night, and to finally learn the truth about himself and his family. A shocking and addictive psychological thriller, The Good Son explores the mysteries of mind and memory, and the twisted relationship between a mother and son, with incredible urgency.

To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. Cash is tight, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

While HBO’s award-winning adaptation shed a new light on this thriller from Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies was a riveting bestseller before Reese Witherspoon and company entered the picture. Set in a small, posh, Australian community, Big Little Lies traces a tangled web of lies and secrets that eventually proves deadly.