Best Thriller-Suspense Books to Read
Top 10 Thriller-Suspense Fiction books
A character in jeopardy dominates these stories. Thrillers present readers with the feeling of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation, and anxiety. This genre involves pursuit and escapes with a lot of clues to follow. It is a villain-driven plot and contains cliffhangers to attract the readers’ attention and usually surprises them with a climax at the end. Some threats are surrounding the protagonist, which can be physical or psychological, or both. It is fast-paced, and the tension mounts as the clock ticks. The protagonist should also overcome a big challenge in a limited time frame. Thriller-suspense has numerous overlapping sub-genres.
The Silence of the Lambs
The Silence of the Lambs is a multi genres novel by Thomas Harris. First published in 1988, it is the sequel to Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon. Both novels feature the cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter; this time pitted against FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling.
Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, is asked to carry out an errand by Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI division that draws up psychological profiles of serial killers. Starling is to present a questionnaire to the brilliant forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is serving nine consecutive life sentences in a Maryland mental institution for a series of murders. Crawford’s real intention, however, is to try to solicit Lecter’s assistance in the hunt for a serial killer dubbed “Buffalo Bill”, whose modus operandi involves kidnapping overweight women, starving them for up to two weeks, killing and skinning them, and dumping the remains in nearby rivers. The nickname was started by Kansas City Homicide, as a sick joke that “he likes to skin his humps.” Throughout the investigation, Starling periodically returns to Lecter in search of information, and the two form a strange relationship in which he offers her cryptic clues in return for information about her troubled and bleak childhood as an orphan.
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Harper
The Dry
The Dry is a mystery, suspense, police procedural by Jane Harper, published in 2016.
After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.
Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. And Falk will find that small towns have always hidden big secrets.
Absolute Power
Absolute Power is a 1996 book by David Baldacci, published in 1996, and was made into a 1997 film starring Clint Eastwood.
An experienced burglar, Luther Whitney, breaks into a billionaire’s house with the intent of robbing it. While there, he witnesses the President of the United States and the billionaire’s wife having sex. However, their lovemaking turns violent, and Secret Service agents burst in and kill the woman, which Whitney also sees. The reason Whitney was able to witness the murder was because he was behind a large one-way mirror that was a secret door into a large closet where the billionaire would sit and watch when his wife had sex with another man. Whitney escapes, but not before the Secret Service learns of his presence; they blame the wife’s murder on Whitney. Whitney goes on the run from the President’s agents while a detective tries to piece together the crime.
Absolute Power
by David Baldacci
Shutter Island
by Dennis Lehane
Shutter Island
Shutter Island is a novel by American writer Dennis Lehane, published in 2003. A film adaptation was released in February 2010.
In 1954, widower U.S. Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule go on a ferry boat to Shutter Island, the home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando (who was incarcerated for drowning her three children). She has escaped the hospital and the desolate island, despite being kept in a locked cell under constant supervision. In Rachel’s room, Teddy and Chuck discover a code that Teddy breaks. He tells Chuck that he believes the code points to a 67th patient when records show only 66. Teddy also reveals that he wants to avenge the death of his wife Dolores, who was murdered two years prior by a man called Andrew Laeddis, who he believes is an inmate in Ashecliffe Hospital. The novel is interspersed with graphic descriptions of World War II and Dachau which Teddy helped to liberate…
The Day of the Jackal
The Day of the Jackal is a thriller novel by English author Frederick Forsyth about a professional assassin who is contracted by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organization, to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France.
The book begins in 1962 with the (historical) failed attempt on de Gaulle’s life planned by Col. Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart: Operation Charlotte Corday. Following the arrest of Bastien-Thiry and remaining conspirators, the French security forces wage a short but extremely vicious “underground” war with the terrorists of the OAS, a militant right-wing group who have labeled de Gaulle a traitor to France after his grant of independence to Algeria.
The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth
The Bourne Identity
by Robert Ludlum
The Bourne Identity
The Bourne Identity is a 1980 spy fiction thriller by Robert Ludlum that tells the story of Jason Bourne, a man with remarkable survival abilities who has retrograde amnesia and must seek to discover his true identity.
The preface of the novel consists of two real-life newspaper articles from 1975 about terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal.” The story opens with gunfire on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. One man is cast into the waves before the boat explodes, and is later picked up by fishermen, who find him clinging to debris. They also find he has amnesia, apparently as a result of a traumatic head injury, with occasional erratic intrusions or flashbacks to the past, but is unable to make sense of them. The only definite evidence of his former life is a small film negative found embedded in his hip containing the information required to access a bank account in Zurich.
Tell No One
Tell No One is a thriller novel by American writer Harlan Coben, published in 2001. The book was Coben’s first novel to appear on The New York Times Best Seller list. It was also adapted into a French film with the same title in 2006.
For Dr. David Beck, the loss was shattering. And every day for the past eight years, he has relived the horror of what happened. The gleaming lake. The pale moonlight. The piercing screams. The night his wife was taken. The last night he saw her alive.
Everyone tells him it’s time to move on, to forget the past once and for all. But for David Beck, there can be no closure. A message has appeared on his computer, a phrase only he and his dead wife know. Suddenly Beck is taunted with the impossible—that somewhere, somehow, Elizabeth is alive.
Beck has been warned to tell no one. And he doesn’t. Instead, he runs from the people he trusts the most, plunging headlong into a search for the shadowy figure whose messages hold out a desperate hope…
Tell No One
by Harlan Coben
Kiss the Girls
by James Patterson
Kiss the Girls
Kiss the Girls is a psychological thriller novel by American writer James Patterson, the second to star his recurring main character Alex Cross, an African-American psychologist and policeman. It was first published in 1995, and was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1997.
As a teenage boy in 1975 Boca Raton, Florida, a future serial killer calling himself Casanova kills his first four victims. Elsewhere in 1981 Chapel Hill, North Carolina, another killer calling himself The Gentleman Caller kills a young couple on a lake. Years later, Casanova leaves a young woman to die in the woods. Around the same time, Police Detective Alex Cross returns to his Washington, DC home to find several relatives waiting for him and is informed that his niece, Naomi “Scootchie” Cross, currently a student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is missing. He travels to North Carolina with his partner Sampson…
The Target
The Target is a thriller novel written by David Baldacci, published in 2014. It is the third installment to feature Will Robie, a highly-skilled U.S. Government assassin.
The President knows it’s a dangerous, high-risk assignment. If he gives the order, he has the opportunity to take down a global menace, once and for all. If the mission fails, he would face certain impeachment, and the threats against the nation would multiply. So the president turns to the one team that can pull off the impossible: Will Robie and his partner, Jessica Reel. Together, Robie and Reel’s talents as assassins are unmatched. But some in power don’t trust the pair. They doubt their willingness to follow orders. And they will do anything to see that the two assassins succeed, but that they do not survive…
The Target
by David Baldacci
Invisible
by Patterson and David Ellis
Invisible
Invisible is a thriller novel written by Patterson and David Ellis, published in 2013.
Emmy Dockery is an FBI research analyst on leave. She has been obsessed with a large number of fires in which a single person always died, including one involving her sister. Local authorities, finding no foul play, ruled all these fires were accidental. New fires fitting the pattern claimed by Emmy continue to occur. No one believes Emmy, and some even think she has gone mad. By continuing to insist these explained fires were murders, she has put her career with the FBI in jeopardy. Even her ex-fiancé (nicknamed “Books”), who is an ex-FBI agent, doubts her. But one day she finds the FBI launches something of interest to Books and a preliminary investigation with Books in charge of the investigation and with Emmy on the team. Soon more is found, and this case becomes significant, as hundreds of suspect fires are located nationwide. The situation becomes scary and dangerous to members of the team, as well…