Best Thriller Book Lists

Our editors rank the top thriller and mystery books by year, decade or subgenre. These lists include legal thrillers, crime thrillers, cozy mysteries, FBI thrillers and more.

Best Christmas Mystery Books for the Holiday Season

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This time of year, screens across the globe are filled with Hallmark Christmas movies, modern classics like Elf and old gems like It’s a Wonderful Life. But readers need classics too, and there’s no shortage of great holiday-themed books that warm the hearth while getting your blood racing. Here are three that are just about guaranteed to put you in the holiday spirit. Hercule Poirot’s …

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The Best C.J. Tudor Novels Ranked

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C.J. Tudor is an award-winning novelist who is fast-becoming one of the world’s most popular contemporary British writers. The Chalk Man won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel, the Barry Award, and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut Novel. She’s also the author of The Burning Girls, The Other People and The Hiding Place. As her Amazon author page states, her love of …

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List of the best Stephen King Books

The Best Stephen King Audiobooks Ranked In Order (Updated for 2023!)

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Newly updated to include King’s newest novels, Fairy Tale and Gwendy’s Final Task! The reigning master of suspense is the author of more than 60 books and audiobooks, all of which have been international bestsellers, and many have been translated to the screen. The names are instantly recognizable:  It. Pet Cemetery. Misery. Thinner. All instant classics, and yet King’s craft seems to sweeten with age, with …

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Authors Like Sarah J. Maas: If You Like Maas’ Throne of Glass Series, You Might Like These Authors

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Looking for authors like Sarah J. Maas? If you love Sara J. Maas novels, here’s a list of other authors you might love as well. But first, who is Sarah J. Maas and how did she become so popular? From Manhattan’s upper east side, Maas is an American fantasy author best known for two series: Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses. …

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Best Legal Thrillers of the 21st Century, Ranked (Updated!)

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Conflicted, flawed lawyers. Trials about twisted crimes. Ninth-hour evidence discoveries. Few things in American culture create as much tension as our legal system, which is why courtrooms, law offices, and even the Supreme Court can make perfect backdrops for thrillers. The masters of the legal thriller—a genre that routinely tops the bestsellers lists—have been doing it for decades. But as you’ll find in our list, …

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The Best Crime Thriller Books of the Decade

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The 2010s was a decade chock full of amazing mysteries and thrillers. In particular, the crime thriller genre – inclusive of detective fiction, FBI thrillers, serial killer fiction, heist thrillers, police procedurals and many other whodunnits – has burned brightly. While the genre’s old guard continued to crank out plenty of winners, the decade’s best crime thrillers arguably came from relative newcomers like Gillian Flynn, …

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The Best Thriller Books of 2021

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It’s with great pleasure that we announce the winners and finalists of the 2021 BestThrillers.com Book Awards. This award series is devoted to recognizing the year’s top English-language books across 15 major categories ranging from Action Thriller to Spy Thriller. While many more great books are deserving of recognition, these fantastic books represent the best of the best in each category. As you’ll see in …

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FLASHBACK: The Best Thriller Books of 2019

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2019 was an amazing year for fans of mystery and thriller books. An abundance of endlessly entertaining choices came from all categories, including crime thrillers, medical thrillers, legal thrillers, psychological thrillers, fantasy novels and more. Narrowing the list down from the hundreds of books our team has read this year to just a handful was daunting. In terms of authors, our 2019 list of the …

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Kill Shot book cover by Vince Flynn

Ranking The Best of Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp Books

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Vince Flynn ushered in his counter-terrorism hero, Mitch Rapp, in the late 1990s and never looked back. His Mitch Rapp political thrillers are reliable best-sellers, and even after Flynn died far too young at age 47, the series continues through author Kyle Mills, who has done incredibly well with big shoes to fill. The Rapp character was finally brought to big screen in 2017 with …

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