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.

The 19 Best FBI Thriller Books (Updated!)

FBI thrillers are pervasive throughout the entertainment landscape. Almost since the FBI was founded during the Teddy Roosevelt presidency in 1908, novelists and filmmakers alike have been cooking up fictional episodes of the legendary G-men. Some of these classic tales are tributes, and many more are conspiracy theories. More often than not in books about the FBI, the feds are positioned as the outsiders that …

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Dean Koontz books ranked

The Best Dean Koontz Books (Updated for 2023)

With more than 100 novels published and a reported 450 million novels sold, is it any wonder that Dean Koontz is one of the most popular writers of all time? Koontz is listed at #2 overall in Amazon’s Author Rank, behind only the inimitable J.K. Rowling. But if you’re new to Koontz’s work, where do you start? Koontz’s books are primarily thrillers, but commonly incorporate …

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The Best Thriller Books of 2022: The Complete List

The results are in for the BestThrillers.com Book Awards, the award series that recognizes the year’s top English-language books across 15 major categories: Action Thriller, Crime Thriller, Conspiracy Thriller, Fantasy, Historical Thriller, Horror, Legal Thriller, Medical Thriller, Military Thriller, Mystery, Political Thriller, Psychological Thriller, Romantic Suspense, Sci-Fi and Spy Thriller. The Book of the Year honor goes to Girl Missing by Kate Gable, a murder …

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Best Christmas Mystery Books for the Holiday Season

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

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

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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The Best Crime Thriller Books of the Decade

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

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

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

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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