Crime Thriller Books

The best crime thriller book reviews. “Crime thriller” is a catch-all term for thriller subgenres that feature a struggle for dominance between criminals and law enforcement, such as mafia thriller, police procedural, detective fiction, true crime, serial killer fiction and others.

Death in Durango, a Highly Recommended Murder Mystery by James E. Merriman

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The Bottom Line: A twisty, atmospheric murder mystery set against the cinematic beauty of Colorado’s high country. Highly recommended. Death in Durango opens on the night of a murder. Seventy-eight-year-old Mike Driscoll has traded New York business life for a working ranch outside Durango, but the move West has hardly made his life simpler. His marriage to the much younger Misty is deteriorating, his daughter

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The Dark Lottery

The Dark Lottery, a Wickedly Funny Murder Mystery by Mike Stetz

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The Bottom Line: Wickedly funny and emotionally raw, The Dark Lottery is a murder mystery with a hero you’ll be quoting long after the last page. As The Dark Lottery opens, twentysomething San Diego house painter Connie Keen is staring at the ruined Ocean Beach pier. Twenty years earlier, his much older brother Kenny went over the railing after sneaking onto the closed pier to

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The 20 Best FBI Thriller Books (Updated)

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What are the best FBI Thrillers you haven’t read yet? This list of  20 staff-picked FBI Thrillers is filled with gems. FBI thrillers remain 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

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A Hall of Mirrors, a First-Rate Legal Thriller by CD Wilsher

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The Bottom Line: A first-rate, hugely entertaining legal thriller. Get ready to fall hard for Frank Connor.  Washed-up Texas lawyer Frank Connor is presented with the kind of second chance that seems too good to be true. Broke, professionally damaged and pursued by the IRS, Frank lands a lucrative position with prominent Houston plaintiff’s attorney Dickie Glatz. The job also comes with the firm’s biggest

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Murder on Cape Cod, an Edge-of-Your-Seat Legal Thriller by James E. Carroll

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The Bottom Line: Murder on Cape Cod brilliantly trades summer charm for off-season bloodshed, delivering an edge-of-your-seat legal thriller that captivates from the first reversal to the final reckoning. In the third installment in James E. Carroll’s Jamie Carson series, a Cape Cod community bracing for a winter storm is rocked by the discovery of a body half-buried in a salt pile. The victim is

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Normal for the Spider, a Must-Read Thriller by Hank Schwaeble

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The Bottom Line: A must-read blend of horror, crime and comedy that reinvents the predator-versus-predator thriller. Warning: this review may contain spoilers! Normal for the Spider opens in an unnamed American city as Sienna Shaw, a practiced thief and experienced killer who committed her first murder shortly after turning fourteen, realizes she is being followed. Seeking to lose her pursuers, Sienna slips into a bookstore

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Blue Ridge, a High-Stakes Crime Thriller by James Foley

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The Bottom Line: The kind of second series book that fans expect: bigger stakes, harder questions and much more to lose. The second book in James Foley’s Lisa Owens series moves its protagonist from Miami homicide work into an FBI investigation stretching between Washington, D.C., and North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Foley begins with a massacre whose consequences will echo for half a century, opening

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Before the Devil Knows, An Irresistible Crime Thriller by R. John Dingle

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The Bottom Line: Irresistible. Before the Devil Knows pushes Dingle’s Gus Wheeler series into its darkest terrain yet, where religious terror and ritual murder collide. Before the Devil Knows opens in the Maine woods with the kind of betrayal that makes a book impossible to put down. Teenager Adam Carson is dragged from his bed, hooded, beaten and chained to a tree and surrounded by

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GLORIA, a Tender and Terrifying Psychological Thriller by Howard Seaborne

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The Bottom Line: Small town noir that is as tender as it is terrifying, GLORIA mesmerizes while asking whether the greatest mysteries live not in the world, but in our minds. GLORIA begins in small-town Wisconsin as Henry Halder, a boy on the cusp of adolescence, loses both legs in a tragic accident. What exactly happened is elusive. While in and out of consciousness across many surgeries, he’s told

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