110 Best Thriller Books Of All Time

But a list celebrating the Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marples of the world leaves a lot to be desired. What about the crime novel or brutal police procedural? What about the spy novel with intrigue aplenty but more derring-do than detection? What about the thrillers in which the person you sympathize with is actually a serial killer? So we’ve gathered 110 of the best thriller, crime and suspense novels of all time. Gothic dramas, iconic secret agents, psychological thrillers that kept you guessing—they’re all here. Let us know which ones you love, which ones you’re going to read next and which thriller books we were crazy not to include. Grab a martini—shaken, not stirred, of course—and enjoy. And if you’re adding to your cart, don’t forget to shop local (we’ve included a few fantastic independent bookstores below, and you can also use this handy tool from Bookshop to buy from an indie near you).

The Best Thriller, Crime and Suspense Books of All Time

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Horrible people can become disturbingly sympathetic once you spend time with them, whether it’s Norman Bates in Psycho or Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter, the serial killer with good intentions. The brilliant Highsmith knew this well, and perhaps her greatest creation, Tom Ripley, toyed with our affections throughout five novels. “The Talented Mr. Ripley is certainly one of the best if not the best thrillers of all time,” says author Karin Slaughter. “Tom Ripley is not just a classic antihero, he is a precursor to so many flawed men we’re meant to root for—from Don Draper to Tony Soprano. Highsmith crafts him as a perpetual underdog, a striver that the reader finds more relatable than the monied snobs he so desperately wants to be a part of.” It’s a delicious irony at the heart of so many crime novels: you’re not supposed to root for the criminal or vicariously enjoy someone knocking off those people who really, really “deserve it.” And yet…

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Woodrell made his name with a series of novels he dubbed Country Noir, tales of crime and survival set mostly in the Missouri Ozarks. He enjoyed acclaim with 1986’s Under The Bright Lights and 2013’s The Maid’s Version, but first among equals is Winter’s Bone, which became an award-winning film and consistently receives high praise. “It’s rare, maybe 100,000 to 1 shot, that a novel will succeed on every level—story, characters, dialogue and description that rises to the level of poetry,” says bestselling author James Patterson (Fear No Evil). “That’s what Daniel Woodrell achieved with Winter’s Bone.”

Live And Let Die by Ian Fleming

The James Bond series by Ian Fleming is more brutal, more blunt than the movies they inspired—at least until the Daniel Craig era went back to the source for inspiration. Given an initial boost by President John F. Kennedy, the books and films about the spy with a license to kill have often been a tantalizing introduction to the world of adults for generations of kids. Acclaimed author Ken Follett (Never) was no exception. “At the age of 12, I had read everything in the children’s library and I was admitted to the grown-up section,” remembers Follett, who began with the Bond book that remains his favorite: Live And Let Die. “I remember asking my father what a martini was,” says Follett. “‘Some kind of drink,’ he said grumpily, clearly having no idea. I could hardly wait to find out.”

In The Woods by Tana French

Why give this list the ungainly name of best thriller/crime/suspense novels? Because French offers up all three at once in her debut work. In it, detectives Maddox and Ryan investigate the murder of a 12-year-old girl, which (as will happen in crime novels) links to Ryan’s past. Author French is deeply invested in the interior lives of her characters, which makes sense since she was a working actress when this came out in 2007. That makes her Dublin Murder Squad series and stand-alone books far more than thrill rides, though thrill they do. Those looking to add up the clues or insist on large-scale action scenes should look elsewhere. Those who realize that understanding our best friends or even ourselves can remain an eternal mystery? You’re in for a treat.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

One of the most acclaimed writers of our time, Atwood is not fond of labels. Despite numerous novels set in dystopian futures and featuring everything from a climate-ravaged world to genetically modified creatures like the pigoon, she hated the label of science fiction. Atwood grudgingly conceded to the term but even then preferred the more hifalutin label of speculative fiction. Well, nuts. We say Atwood should embrace being a sci-fi writer and a crime/suspense novelist to boot. Doubtless, she’d prefer we call Alias Grace a work of historical fiction. Here, Atwood retells the true story of a woman convicted in 1843 of murdering her employer and his housekeeper. Atwood has revisited this story repeatedly, first in poetry, then a TV movie in 1974 and finally this novel (which itself became an acclaimed miniseries in 2017). Atwood changed her mind over the years about whether the real Grace was guilty or not, but here, the conclusion is tantalizingly vague. Whether or not this is historical fiction or a crime novel or a murder mystery, it’s definitely art. And that means you don’t always get a tidy label—or conclusion.

Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less by Jeffrey Archer

Whether you’re talking the George Clooney/Brad Pitt franchise or the 1960 Frank Sinatra/Rat Pack original, the Ocean’s Eleven movies have nothing on this scam. In Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, four men are ripped off by an unscrupulous businessman but have no legal recourse. So they team up and use their unique skills (art dealer, Oxford don and the like) and the villain’s many weaknesses (lust for a van Gogh, vanity, etc.) to scam the money back. Exactly the money he stole: not a penny more, not a penny less. It’s clever, fun and has a great twist, just like the Sinatra Ocean flick. Politician turned novelist Lord Jeffrey Archer pulled off a trick almost as good. He went from political disgrace in financial ruin to one of the world’s most successful writers of all time, starting with this. Years later, when he was jailed for perjury, Archer turned that into a best-selling prison diary, too. Resourceful chap, just like his protagonists.

Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara

This staggering masterwork was edited and acclaimed by no less than Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Bambara tackles the Atlanta child murders of the late ‘70s. Instead of plunging into the mind of the killer or watching the police try to track them down, Bambara brings to life the families left shattered by the disappearance or death of a child. She shows the women organizing to demand justice. She shows the world of Atlanta, and indeed, of America. And she shows how justice is tinged by the color of your skin. Bambara’s posthumous novel captures everything from disco to the Iran hostage crisis to the poison of class and racism. It became her legacy when colon cancer cut her life too short at the age of 56.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

This was a phenomenon and a passionate precursor to the #MeToo movement—don’t forget, in Sweden, this book was originally titled Men Who Hate Women. In it, a journalist teams up with the not-victim-but-avenger Lisbeth Salander to expose the corruption of Swedish billionaires, fanatical secret Nazis, rapists, drug cartels and a few other baddies for good measure. Larsson, who died before any of the books were published, modeled his iconic heroine on everyone from Pippi Longstocking to Modesty Blaise. Since he peppered his books with references to other crime writers (like Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid and, of course, Agatha Christie), it’s likely the girl with the dragon tattoo led readers to more of the books on this very list.

L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

Hammett. Chandler. Macdonald. That’s the august company James Ellroy joined with the L.A. quartet, four novels that raised his game considerably. The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz cemented a reputation that grew even more with the Underworld USA trilogy. But you have got to start somewhere, so why not L.A. Confidential, the novel that in 1997 inspired one of the best crime films of all time? It depicts a 1950s Los Angeles so corrupt and violent that Deadwood seems like Disneyland. Riveting.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

A Gothic tale. A haunted marriage. A powerful man and a weaker woman. It’s a recipe for a psychological melodrama (loaded word, that!) and a recipe for critical disdain. An immediate bestseller, du Maurier’s masterpiece is now acclaimed as a classic, but it was a long time coming, despite an Oscar-winning film adaptation and one of the great opening lines of all time. “This book forever altered my perception of what crime novels could be,” says author S.J. Watson (Final Cut). “I love the fact that Rebecca—the title character!—exists only as an absence at the heart of the book and also the fact that the narrator herself is unnamed throughout.” Its greatest accomplishment may be the fact that it’s now so clearly seen as belonging to the thriller/suspense genre. While he appreciates the plotting, Watson points out that it’s “also an exploration of power, of the men who have it and the women who don’t, and the secrets told to preserve it.”

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze

Some people have favorite record labels, names they trust to deliver music that will satisfy. The same is true for publishers, and none are better at reissuing often obscure novels you didn’t know you needed than the New York Review Books Classics. You simply can’t go wrong with anything they put out, from the word-of-mouth sensation Stoner by John Williams (one of the great publishing success stories of the 2000s) to the noir gem Black Wings Has My Angel. In it, Jim Sunblade (what a name!) escapes from prison, stumbles into a dispassionate bad girl named Virginia and together they plan the perfect heist. Watching it all go horribly wrong and wondering when or if Jim will realize Virginia is not to be trusted AT ALL is bleak fun of the highest order.

The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy

No one expects a novel published by the modest Naval Institute Press to set the bestseller lists on fire. But that’s what Clancy did with a book that was half thriller, half owner’s manual (after reading his absorbingly detailed descriptions of weaponry and machinery, many readers assumed they were ready to pilot a military submarine). “I distinctly remember thinking it was something special,” says author Jack Carr (The Devil’s Hand). “Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was reading a work that would launch a series of books, films, adaptations, spin-offs, video games and multiple works of non-fiction in an enterprise that shows no signs of slowing down. Crack it open today to be transported back to 1984, a time when Reagan was in the White House and the Cold War was in full swing.”

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

How soon is too soon to name something a classic? Naturally, our list leans toward novels that have been around a while. You don’t want to throw around the word “classic” every time a new book captures your fancy. But it’s not too soon to recognize the remarkable acclaim and success of S.A. Cosby’s noir novels, especially Blacktop Wasteland from 2020. Our hero Bug Montage is one of the best wheelmen around, but he’s done with that life for good. Uh-huh. Then the bills pile up and a friend comes calling with a can’t-miss caper, and Bug reluctantly agrees to do what he does best just one more time. A rich novel that captures the lethal trap of poverty and prejudice—and how one wrong choice can leave you with no choice at all for the rest of your life.

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

Sometimes, all it takes is a character. In this case, that character is the delightfully offbeat Odd Thomas, a short-order cook who can see the dead. They don’t speak to him, but they communicate…something. And when they linger, Odd realizes it’s for a reason and sets out to right wrongs. An unfailingly polite young man when this series began in 2003, Odd is surrounded by friends and loved ones who actually take his second sight seriously, including his landlord, his girlfriend and even the chief of police in their small town. Thank goodness, because when a stranger comes to town practically swarmed by ghosts, Odd realizes something very, very bad is about to happen—unless he can save the day.

The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

A classic tale of revenge about a man wrongly imprisoned, this is just one of the many swashbuckling tales by Dumas and others that laid the groundwork for the classic modern thriller. “Edmond Dantès’ heroic escape and subsequent triumph against his enemies is carried out in a series of brilliant coups, by exploiting each of his enemies’ vulnerabilities (greed, power, lasciviousness) in such a way that each villain brings about his own downfall,” says author Katherine Neville (The Fire), who gleefully follows in his footsteps. “A real tour de force that will never lose its literary power.”

Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh

Moshfegh grabs you at the start. Her narrator Eileen is trapped. Trapped by an alcoholic father she must care for. Trapped in a miserable job at what amounts to a prison for boys (such are juvenile correction centers). Trapped in a cycle of petty shoplifting and mordant humor and the pointlessness of it all. And then, like the explosion of color in The Wizard Of Oz, in walks the beautiful and enchanting Rebecca Saint John as the new counselor for those wayward teens—and a new best friend for Eileen. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this debut was so well done, most critics didn’t even see it for the noir gem it was.

Out of Bounds by Val McDermid

A leader of Tartan Noir, McDermid’s hero in Out of Bounds is Karen Pirie, who is “smart and tenacious, and will follow any lead to find answers, even though she usually has to go around her male bosses to get results,” says Deb Leonard of Literati Books of Ann Arbor, Mich. “She’s a cold case detective in Scotland who is called into the case after a teenager crashed a stolen car. Meanwhile, she’s also investigating a mystery that is tied to a terrorist bombing 20 years ago.”

The Silence Of The Lambs by Thomas Harris

Yes, of course, the movie. But the novel! It’s the second of four books centering on the magnetic, chilling serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The first, Red Dragon, became an exceptionally good film called Manhunter. This one became a film for the ages, the first horror-tinged movie to win the Best Picture Oscar. But the writing! Everyone from children’s author Roald Dahl to meta-magician David Foster Wallace praised it to high heaven. Just don’t expect to sleep until you finish it. And then don’t expect to sleep easily.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Tartt arrived with a thunderclap via the murder-on-campus success of The Secret History. But author Chris Pavone (The Paris Diversion) speaks up for her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch as equally belonging to the world of crime fiction. The novel, triggered by a terrorist act and the almost accidental filching of a painting, “is a sprawling masterpiece of suspense that also happens to be a book about nearly everything: family and loss and grief and despair and growing up and art and betrayal and many types of love,” says Pavone. Since Tartt takes a good decade between releases, it’s good that, as Pavone says, the novel is “very long (at 784 pages) but for me, not nearly long enough. It’s a book I could read forever.”

Along Came A Spider by James Patterson

Patterson is in a league of his own. No other author has collaborated so often with so many writers (and helped launch or reinvigorate their solo careers). No other author has released so many successful bestsellers in recent years. And none have so passionately donated and supported libraries, independent bookstores and the pleasures of reading. And none of his many, many series for adults and kids or stand-alone thrillers have proven as popular and enduring as the Alex Cross books. Launched in 1993 with Along Came A Spider, they’ve shown a widowed father and detective doing his damndest to balance work, family and the occasional romance (though dating Cross is a sure-fire recipe to be put in danger). Sure, he might miss Christmas Eve while battling terrorists, but Cross always makes it up somehow. Action-packed but rooted in family and love, it’s the very model of an ongoing series that delivers precisely what fans hope for.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

I believe we have found a case where you can love a novel and still agree the movie was even better. Keep in mind, author Puzo co-wrote the screenplays for both The Godfather and The Godfather II, so he is creatively key to the films. And the man owned the 1970s, what with the Godfather franchise and his penning the screenplay for the best comic book film of them all, Superman: The Movie. But it began with the 1969 novel, a book that made those cold ruthless people who destroyed their souls somehow also seem glamorous if you weren’t paying close attention. It cannily mixed in thinly disguised portraits of Frank Sinatra and real-life mobsters and introduced us to ideas like omertà, Cosa Nostra and consigliere to pitch-perfect effect.

A Coffin For Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

James Bond gives his stamp of approval for this early British master of the spy novel. In From Russia, With Love, Bond is seen reading The Mask Of Dimitrios (a.k.a. A Coffin For Dimitrios) on a plane trip to Istanbul. Mind you, Ambler didn’t write about professionals like 007. His heroes were Hitchcockian characters—ordinary people who unexpectedly find themselves immersed in a most dangerous game but rise to the occasion. In this case, it involves a Balkan brew of assassination, drug dealing and espionage. You can’t go wrong with any Ambler written until the war took over his life in 1940. After that, the staunch anti-fascist ended up in the army’s film unit and soon segued into the movies, where he wrote the script for the film about the Titanic, A Night To Remember.

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

James Crumley was a “writer’s writer,” which means his books never sold that much, but boy were they good. Heck, when the legendary author Ray Bradbury wrote three mystery novels, he named the detective Crumley in honor of the man! “[The Last Good Kiss] is the best private eye novel I’ve ever read,” says author Dennis Lehane, just one of many to bow before it. “Best first sentence, most satisfying ending, most beautifully written from beginning to end.” In the novel, investigator C.W. Sughrue is lured away from his job at a topless bar to find a wayward writer but ends up hunting down a woman missing for more than a decade. Crumley died in 2008, but not before enjoying a late-career appreciation from many quarters. “One of the great pleasures of my life,” says Lehane, “was getting to meet Crumley and tell him that his masterpiece forever changed my perception of what a crime novel could be.”

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

A major force in television, Locke has been a writer and producer on the soapy pleasures of Empire, the Central Park Jogger miniseries When They See Us and Little Fires Everywhere. If all that acclaimed work keeps her from writing more crime fiction, it’s our loss. Her best achievement to date is the launch of a series about a one-time Texas Ranger drawn back to the small town he left far behind. “A great mystery must have a well-developed sense of place,” says Deb Leonard of Literati Books, who loves highlighting diverse voices, especially when the author is so knock-out good. “This book is set in East Texas, an area that has long been considered a law into itself, with its murky bayous and bloodlines and only slightly-under-the-surface racial tensions that have been simmering for generations. A great writer.”

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

If Monty Python tackled the crime genre, it would probably be interrupted by the Spanish Inquisition. But before that happened, one can imagine their antic brains cooking up something like The Eyre Affair, a world where literary detectives protect classic novels from theft, abandonment and even murder. It’s a favorite of Sarah Young of The Raven bookstore in Lawrence, Kan. “Oh, boy, strap in when you pick up this book,” Young says. “It’s a genre-bending, time-traveling, surrealistic alternative universe thriller. The main character is Thursday Next, who transports through the ‘prose portal’ into the novel Jane Eyre, where a criminal from her own world kidnaps Jane and threatens to change the ending of the novel. Yeah, it’s weird and fun and Jasper Fforde is a wicked genius.”

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

Sure, we could have included Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a much earlier novel with a similar plot. But Cain’s hard-boiled classic has that one beat when it comes to great dialogue dipped in arsenic. Zola captured the poisonous suspicion of two people involved in a brutal crime. But Cain nails the terrible cynicism of it all as we watch a woman convince a patsy of an insurance agent to help kill her husband so they can both collect the payout. It helps if you picture Barbara Stanwyck playing the woman in perhaps the greatest noir film of all time.

The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald

Popstar Jimmy Buffett once sang, “Travis McGee’s still in Cedar Key” in his song “Incommunicado.” He’s capturing how fans of a character want to keep them alive by re-reading a series or insisting others dive in. That way, Holmes is always at 221-B; Miss Marple is happily ensconced at St. Mary Mead; and McGee remains on his houseboat in Florida. “Great suspense, surprising plot twists, and a nightmarish but very believable villain,” remembers Jeff Lindsay (Fool Me Twice), who first read McGee’s story as a kid. “The smell of saltwater and diesel is tangible, and the final image of bad guy Junior Allen is like something from an awful dream.”

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

It’s remarkable how many books in the crime genre become part of popular culture. Flynn’s massive blockbuster thriller still reverberates in the mind as a novel about a scheming spouse…or perhaps a novel about how the media loves a scheming spouse…or perhaps how we secretly love it when the media piles on to a scheming spouse. Let’s face it, Gone Girl is a roller coaster as the seemingly happy marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne falls apart in the white-hot glare of a missing wife. Infidelity! Betrayal! Hidden diaries! Faked diaries! Clues! False clues! You can’t trust anyone or anything in this masterful tale filled with unreliable narrators. Unreliable except for Flynn, that is, who knows exactly what she’s doing.

The Force by Don Winslow

A novelist of the first order, Winslow served in the Navy and worked as a private investigator before turning to books full time. He’s created three different ongoing heroes, numerous stand-alone titles and a trilogy that serves as his greatest work so far (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border). But maybe the best way in is Winslow’s stand-alone novel The Force, a riveting look at cops today that rivals Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh at their best. Stephen King said, “Think The Godfather, only with cops. It’s that good.” And as soon as you’re done, you’ll want to head right to The Power Of The Dog. Trust us.

Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart

Romantic suspense doesn’t get any better than Mary Stewart, who rose above the competition thanks to elegant prose and marvelous touches like breaking this novel into nine sections (a la nine coaches) and sprinkling poetry and other quotes throughout to telling effect. Invariably, women are placed in danger but manage to solve a mystery while developing a romance with some dashing fellow. “Here, we have a murder mystery, a woman in jeopardy and a classic Gothic set in the remote Chateau Valmy in the French Alps,” says Barbara Peters of The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Az. The main characters are “a handsome, darkly brooding master and a young English governess looking after a 9-year-old heir while probing at least one dark secret. Obvious comparisons are Jane Eyre and even Cinderella.”

Dare Me by Megan Abbott

The smaller the world, the higher the stakes. Abbott proves this conclusively in her novel about a high school cheerleading squad. The team is ripped apart when a suicide leads the police to take a closer look at Coach Colette and the young women vying for her praise. Friendship, loyalty, trust, betrayal, suspense, desire, obsession—it’s all there if you’re ready to take seriously the inner lives of young women determined to succeed. Abbott is. And reading this, you will too.

The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Yep, Dickens is one of the great crime novelists of all time. He has a gift for devious characters and scheming and cruel deeds that cry out for justice but don’t always get it. Nothing shows that better than the serialized novel Oliver Twist, which still fascinates with its depiction of a school for criminals and the way poverty can trap a person (even a little boy) into thievery. While Fagin remains an ugly stereotype of anti-Semitism, the novel rises above that flaw. The Artful Dodger is the most charming of pickpockets; Bill Sikes the most terrible of men. And it’s all so delightful and suspenseful and just plain fun it’s no wonder it was turned into Oliver! the musical. Who wouldn’t break into song?

Room by Emma Donoghue

The darkest and best crime novels don’t plunge us into depravity, they shine a light into the shadows and let us confront them. That’s why a novel about a woman who is abducted, trapped in a tiny space and then gives birth to a little boy who spends the first five years of his life knowing nothing but the room captured the imagination of the world. “Room is quite simply one of the most powerful, most beautiful novels I’ve ever read,” says author Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds). “It’s one of those stories that linger, that stay with you, that make you see the world in a slightly different way.” Donoghue moves beyond the simple “will they escape” to grapple with the aftermath of trauma amidst a media frenzy.  “For thriller fans, it may not be what you expect, and not what you’ve read before,” says Hannah, “but it’s impossible to put down.”

Eye Of The Needle by Ken Follett

History will remember Follett as the writer of The Pillars of the Earth, which turns the building of a cathedral in the 12th century into lofty suspense. But before Follett detoured into architecture, he constructed some of the best thrillers around. World War II was a favorite stomping ground, and his first big success was Eye Of The Needle. Turned into a nifty film starring Donald Sutherland, it shows a German spy discovering the truth about D-Day. While trying to escape, he’s shipwrecked on a windswept island. Only a lonely young wife stands between the spy and the greatest coup in espionage. What makes this so gripping is how WWII may hinge on whether she’s falling in love with him or he’s falling in love with her.

False Witness by Karin Slaughter

You might start with Slaughter’s first book, Blindsighted, the one that enjoyed immediate acclaim and led to 16 novels in two cross-pollinating series. Or pick up Cop Town, a sensational look at female officers in 1970s Atlanta who have as many problems with their male co-workers as they do with perps. (Where’s the movie? Where’s the sequel?) But we say just grab her latest. False Witness is a thriller (dear god, yes) with a defense attorney blackmailed into defending her very guilty client. Yet, like her best novels, it’s so much more: a story of addiction, of two people dealing with trauma in their own flawed ways, of life amidst a pandemic, of buried family secrets. But leave no doubt:  you’re on the edge of your seat the entire time.

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Suspense comes in many forms. Is your child bullying another kid at school? Will you make friends with the new parents you meet when bringing your kid to school? Will you want to? These everyday worries peel back to reveal much darker truths in Moriarty’s massive bestseller that became a hugely popular miniseries on HBO starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. Domestic abuse, rape, a pact to keep a sudden moment of violence secret, and before you know it, those big little lies become very big indeed. It’s one of those books that happily expands what the genre can encompass.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

Serial killers can be chillingly magnetic (Hannibal Lecter), sweetly hapless (Norman Bates), upwardly mobile and charming (Tom Ripley), or they can be Dexter, a nice guy who—like Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation—strives to simulate the emotions of other people as much as possible. He’s nice to his sister, good at his job as a forensic analyst and when the need to kill becomes overwhelming, Dexter channels it into taking out really, really bad people like (other) serial killers, child molesters and those who have evaded the long arm of the law. What’s not to like? Lindsay’s memorable creation turned into eight alliterative novels, an eight-season award-winning TV series starring Michael C. Hall, an animated series and now a 10-episode Showtime revival called Dexter: New Blood. Even when Lindsay wrote Dexter Is Dead, he was no more successful at offing the man than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was with Holmes. It proves once again that great characters never die.

Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates

Just the third book in a remarkable career, Expensive People came out in 1968. Her next work would win the National Book Award and clearly, Oates never looked back. Here, Oates delivers a Gothic tale in the voice of a chubby, unloved boy in an upper-middle-class family who calmly tells us he is a murderer. Otessa Moshfegh (Death In Her Hands) still recalls the thrill of first reading it. “This was one of the most exciting novels I picked up when I was a young writer, and has the best opening of all time,” says Moshfegh. “It’s a fictional memoir-cum-confession of a murderer who happens to be an 18-year-old boy with an uncanny intelligence and the complex misery that results from affluence and neglect.” With 60-plus novels, 40-plus short story collections, 11 novellas and more, Oates can clearly do it all, including thrillers.

Swamp Sister by Robert Edmond Alter

Gold Medal Books revolutionized publishing by launching a series of paperback originals in the 1950s. For all the big names it generated, Gold Medal also produced some great works that came and went without garnering their due. Before his death in December 2021, we asked author Andrew Vachss (Carbon) his favorite crime fiction. He pointed to this novel as proof positive. “Ignored by the literati, relegated to “pulp” status by his (perhaps forced) choice of publishers, Robert Edmond Alter’s mastery of plot, character and interstitial tissue was unparalleled for its era,” said Vachss. “And half a century on, it still holds its ground. Powerfully. Doubt me? Try Swamp Sister. It won’t take you long to read, but you’ll remember it forever.”

Flood by Andrew Vachss

And speaking of Vachss, one must rank the late author’s passionate crusade against child abuse in the real world as the most important work he did. But that advocacy extended to the white-hot urgency of his novels, and they’re all the better for it. Author Barry Eisler (The Chaos Kind) was immediately grabbed by Flood, the debut novel of this lawyer and one-time juvenile prison director. “I first read it in 1989, then immediately blew through the rest of the Vachss oeuvre (which was relatively small then, but massive now),” says Eisler. “The only fictional aspects of Vachss’s ultrahard-boiled novels are the dark, damaged characters populating them, and even these, it’s clear, are based on people Vachss has known. But the settings (typically the rancid underbelly of New York City) and the plots (typically involving sociopaths who prey on children, and their familiars in the civilian world) are all from the hard path walked by Vachss himself.”

Coma by Robin Cook

No, Coma didn’t invent the medical thriller. It just feels like it did. Cook struck a nerve in the paranoid 1970s with his story about a female medical student uncovering a creepy plot to induce comas in patients so their organs can be harvested for the black market. The novel was a runaway bestseller perfectly in tune with an era that produced other elaborate paranoias about faked moon landings and aliens among us. The film version gave fellow thriller author Michael Crichton his biggest hit as a director, and Cook never looked back, delivering new medically tinged thrillers to keep patients on their toes right up to this year’s Viral.

Clockers by Richard Price

When a crime novel is so good even mainstream critics feel obliged to review and praise it, they invariably dance around the truth. Clockers, they say, is a depiction of modern society, a dissection of our social ills, a novel with a broad canvas that uses the conventions of a crime novel to uncover greater truths. Or, as we might say, Clockers is the sort of crime novel that does exactly what the best crime novels have always done: It tells a gripping story with great characters, intense plotting and the highest of stakes. Price captures the workaday dynamics of a small drug gang in New Jersey and how it’s as much a part of the community as the local cops, the small business owners and the kids playing on the streets. If that makes you think of HBO’s The Wire, it should. Bonus: the novel was turned into one of director Spike Lee’s best films.

The Day Of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

The 1970s was a peak period for thrillers, and this classic by Frederick Forsyth is a major reason why. It was dismissed by publishers for one very simple reason: How could anyone sit on the edge of their seats about an attempted assassination of French leader Charles de Gaulle when the entire world knew de Gaulle was very much alive and well and living in Paris? A U.K. publisher took a chance, word of mouth was immediate and a modern classic was born. Jeffery Deaver (The Midnight Lock) relishes it still. “We follow a brilliant, amoral assassin as he moves closer and closer to his target, while our hero, a modest French police officer, doggedly pursues,” says Deaver. “This is my go-to model for an unstoppable roller coaster of a read.”

The Firm by John Grisham

No one has ever owned the legal thriller the way Grisham does. Despite numerous novels on other subjects like baseball and Christmas, the law is his bread and butter. What made his second novel The Firm such a breakout? Is it the too-good-to-be-true dream job that turns out to be a poisoned apple? Is it the action that escalates slowly and inexorably but always believably? Perhaps it’s just the delicious pleasure of realizing even lawyers can’t trust other lawyers. Grisham fights for the underdog in many novels (and in real life, by supporting the Innocence Project). So the legal system can sometimes work, poorly and creakily, but in The Firm you know it’s usually working for the bad guys.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

When Harris combined the conventions of crime families with the world of vampires and tossed in a psychic waitress from the small town of Bon Temps for good measure, she gave a fresh spin to both horror and crime. “I remember when I first read this quirky vampire thriller long before it became the inspiration for the hit HBO series True Blood,” says Young of The Raven bookstore, who loved watching our heroine Sookie Stackhouse “trying to navigate a world where vampires have come out of the shadows to mingle with the rest of society. Harris’s books always have a tinge of darkness, and this first entry in the Southern Vampire Mysteries is a wild ride.”

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Lehane could easily be on this list for his terrific Kenzie & Gennaro series, the books that immediately marked the writer as a major talent. Or why not the Joe Coughlin trilogy set against Prohibition, a police strike and with stops in Cuba and Tampa, Fla.? Lehane is one reason we’ve limited most authors to just one book; otherwise we’d run out of room too quickly. And if you’re going to pick just one Lehane novel, you’re going to pick Mystic River, the story of three childhood friends whose lives are forever shattered when one of them is abducted by child molesters. Twenty-five years later, a brutal murder brings the three of them back into each other’s lives—even though the trauma of that long-ago tragedy meant they were inextricably bound forever. A classic.

The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver

A villain with sadistic flair who brings New York City to its knees. A tortured and brilliant quadriplegic hero considering suicide. And enough high-tech toys to make C.S.I. jealous. Some books (and some characters, like The Bone Collector’s Lincoln Rhyme) seem ready-made for the movies—it’s no surprise Deaver is one of the few Americans authorized to write a new adventure for James Bond. But an unsatisfying film in 1999 and a one-and-done TV series last year prove it’s not so easy to capture the “cinematic” verve of even the best modern thrillers. Maybe the best movie-ready books are really books the movies aren’t ready for yet. If you want these thrills, you’ll just have to start reading. And don’t worry, Deaver has delivered 15 so far, including 2021’s The Midnight Lock.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Waters is a bestselling, acclaimed author in the U.S., but she looms even larger in the U.K. And Fingersmith is where fans of crime novels on any continent should begin. Romantic suspense, Dickensian twists and more abound in this Victorian-era thriller that’s an ideal marriage between a classic cliffhanger and a very modern sensibility. An orphan raised to thievery a la Oliver Twist, a young woman seduced into an elopement, heroin addiction, a madhouse, lies, lies and more lies all work to remarkable effect. Like the best thrillers, Fingersmith works so well not just because of its clever plotting but because that skill is combined with characters who are so real.

When The Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block

Ironically, crime writers are terrible at killing off their famous creations. Block thought he was done with the alcoholic ex-cop Matthew Scudder after five novels. Ahh, but then a casual promise to deliver a Scudder short story led to an idea, and soon Block delivered When The Ginmill Closes, a book author Don Winslow said inspired him to write. This novel took Block’s writing to new heights thanks to a tale where Scudder races to discover who robbed a mob-owned bar before the cops get to the guy first. “The plot is terrific, the ending…well, it’s one of the best ever,” says Winslow. “But what makes the book for me is the writing.  Block is a master, not only a superb technician but a genuine poet. What Chandler was to L.A., Block is to New York.”

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Some writers offer a variation on a theme. They have their protagonist, a familiar setting, various elements you can depend on. Other writers are shape-shifters, like Belinda Bauer. She’s dazzled since her debut in 2009, right up to this year’s Exit. And Snap is no exception, with its psychological depth making it the rare crime novel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. In it, a little boy’s mother leaves him in charge as she goes for help when their car breaks down. She never returns, and a few years later, the teenager is still in charge, trying to keep his siblings away from social services while doing a little burgling on the side to stay afloat. Thoroughly engaging on its own terms, this quietly riveting story of survival becomes unbearable suspense when the boy’s story gets entangled with a compulsive criminal and a new detective determined to track the man down. Delightfully unpredictable, but that’s Bauer for you.

The Daughter Of Time by Josephine Tey

It’s the coldest of cold cases: a murder that took place centuries ago and everyone knows the killer. Didn’t Shakespeare make clear Richard III was the villain who had those two innocent princes killed in the tower? Well, writer Josephine Tey’s quietly unconventional masterpiece follows a modern police officer who wonders if the facts actually point to the hated King after all. Tey may be the least well-known of the major crime writers of the 20th century, but her genius is evident. “This is the book that made me realize that the history we’re given isn’t a neat collection of objective facts,” says author Tana French. “It’s selective, it’s skewed, it’s shaped and re-shaped over time to fit various shifting narratives and agendas. I’m a lot more careful about checking sources—not just for history, but for news—since I read this book.”

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

“What are the 39 steps? The 39 Steps are an organization of spies…” BANG! Here, we’re quoting an Alfred Hitchcock film, perhaps the prototypical Hitchcock thriller, about an innocent man on the run. Oscar-winner Robert Towne says it’s no exaggeration to say all escapist entertainment began with that classic movie. And (are you still with us?) that movie found its inspiration from the 1915 Thirty-Nine Steps written by Buchan. It was an instant smash hit thanks to an anti-German sentiment quite popular during World War I, a cliffhanger narrative that betrayed its beginnings as a magazine serial and a compelling tale of spies infiltrating merry olde England. Curiously, the book has been adapted many, many times, but rarely faithfully, starting with the Hitchcock film, numerous radio adaptations and even a comical stage version that proved a long-running hit in London and on Broadway. A new version for Netflix starring Benedict Cumberbatch will likely take as many liberties—and be just as entertaining.

Where Are The Children? by Mary Higgins Clark

Rightly called the Queen of Suspense, the late Clark was hugely popular in the U.S. for almost 40 years, but she looms even larger in France, which has a respect for the “policière” the States have been slower to embrace. Clark, who once modeled alongside a young Grace Kelly, wrote short stories before working in radio. But the moment she attempted a suspense novel in 1975 with Where Are The Children?, success was immediate and permanent. This novel set the standard with its story of a woman whose life is riven by the shocking deaths of her two children. She changes her identity, moves across the country to escape those ghosts, begins a new life with a new husband and new kids, and then looks out the window one morning to realize the children are gone. Again. How can you not read to find out what happens next?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) By Philip K. Dick

A landmark work of science fiction both as a film and novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in a near-future Los Angeles and uses the Philip Marlowe-Sam Spade template to grapple with the idea of what it means to be human. A bounty hunter is tasked with “retiring” six androids who escaped into the general population and are difficult to spot since they look just like everyone else. The police say “retired” because androids can’t be killed—they’re not really alive, are they? Here, you’ve got a police force that’s sometimes as much of a threat as the criminals, and a feeling you’re not being told everything you need to know, just with robots, flying cars and a post-apocalyptic future that proves the detective genre is as timeless as ever.

The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen

Like any parent, Gerritsen’s mom and dad thought a writing career was a dicey proposition. So Gerritsen became a doctor and started practicing in Hawaii. But writing kept calling to her. After a string of romantic thrillers, Gerritsen took a page from fellow doctor Robin Cook and turned to medical thrillers, launching her to hardcover and leading to her first New York Times bestseller. But she really hit paydirt with The Surgeon, which blossomed into the Rizzoli & Isles series of crime novels. They pair the wise-cracking and confident police detective Jane Rizzoli with the brilliant but socially bumbling medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles. Historical fiction and other thrillers are on tap from Gerritsen as well, but we’re not done with Rizzoli & Isles yet (especially since the TV series concluded). Happily, neither is Gerritsen. A new R&I book titled Listen To Me is coming to shelves July 2022.

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Hardboiled is a great word, but it doesn’t do justice to the bleak vision of Thompson. A hardboiled egg is soft on the inside, but a Thompson novel is hard through and through. His life was a struggle right up to the end when alcoholism took its toll. But back in 1952, Thompson delivered The Killer Inside Me, a Dexter-like tale of a small-town deputy sheriff with a sadomasochistic urge he calls the sickness. One of his masterpieces (along with The Grifters and Pop. 1280), Killer opened the floodgates. After taking three or four years between books, Thompson in a frenzy delivered two in 1952, five in 1953 and another five in 1954 before collapsing back to one every year or so. Read them, if you dare.

Conviction by Denise Mina

When Reese Witherspoon, the New York Times and your favorite local bookstore guru praise a thriller, maybe it’s time to jump in? The timely hook of a true-crime podcast is just the start for this page-turner that includes a trophy wife with a secret past, a burnt-out musician sidekick, a sunken yacht, an undependable husband and bad people in pursuit. Not to mention Mina’s gift for a humorous skewering of modern life. It should however come with a warning label: As Leonard of Literati Books puts it, “Don’t pick up this book unless you plan to forgo meals and sleep until you finish it!”

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré

We put Le Carré’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on our list of the best mysteries of all time because it’s riveting to watch George Smiley ferret out a mole in Britain’s MI5 by sitting and thinking. It’s a true mystery, even though Le Carré is usually classified differently. Well, A Perfect Spy may be one of the greatest thrillers ever written, but we could just as easily file it under “memoir.” Le Carré drew deeply upon the relationship he had (or lacked) with his own father, a con man that hobnobbed with violent London gangsters the Kray brothers, made and lost fortunes and charmed everyone within a mile of his magnetism. Author Jeffery Deaver (The Midnight Lock) concurs: “No one writes about espionage like this author,” says Deaver. “But I’ve picked it because it is also one of the most engrossing—and harrowing—portraits of a father-son relationship I’ve ever read. It’s not for the faint of heart, and that warning is not because of car chases and shootouts.”

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Without warning, every once in a while, it seems like everyone you know—everyone—has read, is reading or is about to read the same book. In 2015, that book was The Nightingale, a World War II novel about two estranged sisters resisting the Nazi invasion of France. One secretly shelters Jews, including a neighbor’s child she hides in plain sight as one of her own. The other joins the French Resistance and devises a plan to spirit away stranded Allied pilots to neutral territory. Like the best thrillers, you’re sucked in not by plot twists or the high drama of war but by the characters who become so real to you that their fate is akin to your own.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

“Slow horses” are the screw-ups of the British security service MI5. After royally messing up in one way or another, such agents simply can’t be trusted to do serious work or be dumped back into the real world, so they’re relegated to disgraced MI5 branch Slough House to push papers around. But these Dirty Dozen-like people are determined to redeem themselves and, in the first of eight novels, that means rushing to rescue a man kidnapped and threatened with a beheading live on the internet. It’s being adapted into a series for Apple TV+ starring Gary Oldman, who gave one of the best performances of his career in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Since many call Herron a worthy heir to Le Carré, the casting is perfect.

Rules Of Prey by John Sandford

A long-running series is a special challenge, something only writers who have achieved (or attempted) can fully appreciate. Sandford (the pseudonym for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp) accomplished it with the 31-and-counting Lucas Davenport novels, starting with the first, Rules of Prey. “The characters resonate as human beings who grow throughout the series, the plots are so strong and compelling, and the writing is absolutely solid,” says author Nora Roberts (The Becoming), who herself is at 53 books and counting in her In Death series. The hero, Lucas, begins as a rule-breaking detective in Minneapolis irresistible to women, a la private eyes of old. Lucas will become happily married while working on a special assignment for the governor, but somehow, he remains believably the same man he was at the start.

True Grit by Charles Portis

Let this stone-cold classic stand-in for all the great Westerns that involve crime-fighting, thrills and suspense. They just aren’t usually narrated by a 14-year-old girl so distinctive in nature that you’ll never forget her. But the two films based on it don’t hold a candle. Author Jasper Fforde (The Constant Rabbit) insists this belongs in a celebration of thrillers. “Mattie does not seek blood redress, she seeks justice—to see Chaney “hanged at Judge Parker’s convenience” back home at Little Rock,” Fforde says. “A revenge story, a manhunt, a thriller, a story of trust, love, bravery, duty and tenacity—True Grit has it all.”

The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos

Pelecanos has done so much. He’s created multiple characters who’ve powered their own series. He was a key contributor to HBO’s The Wire, arguably the greatest crime show in TV history. (Sorry Sopranos fans; it’s true.) And he took part in The Pacific, Treme and The Deuce to boot. But Pelecanos went for broke with the D.C. Quartet, four novels that bring D.C. alive, starting in the 1940s with The Big Blowdown. A Greek diner is targeted for a shakedown by organized crime and the damaged anti-hero Peter Karras sees a shot at redemption. Like the nuclear blast that gives this book its title, Pelecanos leveled the competition.

Killing Floor by Lee Child

As long as Greyhound stays in business, you can be certain the very tall, very intimidating, very not-Tom-Cruise character Jack Reacher will continue arriving in new small towns to right wrongs, heading into the sunset or wherever he suspects trouble is next waiting.“I say Jack Reacher is 1949’s Shane riding into town on a bus instead of a horse,” says Barbara Peters of The Poisoned Pen. With the pseudonymous Lee Child handing the reins to his younger brother Andrew, nothing should upset a franchise that, as Peters says, “combines the comforting pull of a series with a brand new setting, story and cast every book. It’s genius!”

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

One of our best writers, Erdrich is also one of our best chroniclers of crime, violence, poverty and its impact on individuals and communities. An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Erdrich finds rich material amidst life on the reservation in North Dakota. Fiction, poetry, children’s books, nonfiction—the Pulitzer-Prize winner has done it all. But the Justice Trilogy is a keystone of her career, encompassing Plague of Doves, LaRose and smack dab in the middle is 2012’s The Round House. It shows a 13-year-old boy frustrated that the police aren’t looking more seriously into a horrific attack on his mother. Disastrously, the kid takes matters into his own hands, with the help of friends and a stolen rifle.  Justice is far, far away but a riveting story and art is right at hand.

Mission to Paris by Alan Furst

Have you ever wanted to travel back in time? Furst has literally done it. Since 1988 and The Polish Soldier, he’s mentally transported himself to Europe right before and during World War II. Warsaw, Paris during the Occupation and Bucharest all come alive in a series loosely dubbed Night Soldiers that encompasses 15 novels and counting. Only the familiar backdrop and Furst’s talent for recapturing a lost era truly links most of these books, which can be enjoyed and read in any order. But taken as a whole, it will soon be seen as a monumental achievement and one not just for fans of espionage—though fans of espionage should eat it up. Why Mission to Paris as our choice? It’s certainly a peak achievement, but the depiction of the City of Light in all its desperate glamor as war looms is just…irresistible.

Mother Love by Domini Taylor aka Roger Longrigg

The author Roger Longrigg was marvelously prolific. Under various pen names, he produced erotic fiction, mysteries (as Frank Parrish), spy novels (as Ivor Drummond), historical novels, a horse-racing thriller and Mother Love, the story of a young English lawyer named Kit Vesey. Kit’s mother Helena simply could not handle the fact that Kit might be friends with her ex-husband and the man’s new wife. So, Kit keeps it a secret, having no idea his mother is truly mad, already a killer and will surely kill again if she discovers the truth. “Both funny and chilling, this is a terrifyingly plausible story of the deadly danger that can grow in a family’s shadows in the name of ‘just tell a white lie to get along,’” says author Kate Quinn.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Thrillers have long enjoyed “exotic” backdrops, with dashing heroes jet-setting to glamorous locales around the world. Thankfully, in recent decades, we’ve begun to appreciate crime novels written by the writers who actually live there. In Chandra’s thriller, you don’t visit Mumbai, you are immersed in it. You get to know Inspector Sartaj Singh, a member of the Mumbai police force isolated from his co-workers by his Sikh faith. You learn to fear the Godfather-like overlord Ganesh Gaitonde. And amidst a nerve-wracking attempt by Singh to snag this most-wanted criminal before the man gets away (or someone else gets the credit), you begin to feel in your bones the world they live in. Masterful.

In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

In this 1947 classic, a would-be screenwriter is helping a detective track down the serial killer stalking women in post-war L.A. But the women who know him best begin to suspect he knows a little too much about how a psychopath might behave. You wouldn’t think a novel from 1947 would so completely upend the passive role of women in noir, but that’s why author Megan Abbott (The Turnout) has championed In A Lonely Place for years. “It anticipates Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and a deluge of serial killer novels that followed, but—for my money—Hughes outsmarts them all,” Abbott says. “It’s a riveting, seductive page-turner as well as, more deeply, a fascinating, pointed and darkly funny exploration of toxic masculinity.”

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

It was this 2007 stand-alone thriller that finally landed Laura Lippman on the New York Times bestseller list and placed her in the front ranks of the very best thriller writers working today—and that’s a very crowded field, as this list makes clear. In What the Dead Know, not one but two girls go missing from a mall. Decades later, a woman involved in a hit-and-run accident claims to be one of those girls, though her story is frustratingly vague and filled with holes. A detective assigned to the case needs to gain her trust while figuring out why so much of what she says doesn’t seem to make sense.“This book haunts you long after you’ve closed the pages,” says Kathy Harig of the Mystery Loves Company bookstore in Oxford, Md. “It’s a riveting domestic crime thriller from an author who just keeps getting better and better.” Page-turning? Oh yes. But also notably infused with an air of compassion often lacking in built-for-speed thrillers.

Sleeping With Strangers by Eric Jerome Dickey

Should the next James Bond be played by Idris Elba? Chiwetel Ejiofor? Instead of waiting around for a casting change, the late author Dickey simply wrote his own globe-trotting adventure with a Black man at its center. Mind you, Gideon is a freelance assassin, rather than one hired by the government. And he might be colder than the famously cold Bond—his name comes from the Bible a preacher was clutching as Gideon gunned the man down, for example. But this glamorous, tense, exciting novel (the first in a series of five) is pure escapist fare. When Gideon heads to London for a new job, he’s unaware another gun-for-hire has been given a new target: Gideon. If he knew, Gideon would still likely be more worried about the three women trying to nail him down with a little commitment. Cancer took Dickey too soon last year, although he left behind some 30 novels and a winning killer named Gideon. To heck with Bond, maybe Idris Elba should just play him.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

In 1939, this iconic thriller by Household was a wish-fulfillment for millions of people around the world. In it, a professional hunter toys with the idea of offing a brutal dictator (maybe Hitler, maybe Stalin—it’s left vague). He has the man in his sights when the country’s security finds him and brutally beats him. Somehow escaping, the hunter makes it back to England, where the secret agents of the dictator show up, still determined to execute him once and for all. “It’s a brilliant cat-and-mouse thriller,” says Peters of The Poisoned Pen. “It’s also a clear inspiration for Frederick Forsyth’s blockbuster thriller The Day of The Jackal.”

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

The title alone should be enough to entice a reader. And since Chabon gloriously celebrated comic books with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Clay, you suspected someday he’d get around to the crime novel. Although maybe you didn’t expect it to be an alternate history sci-fi crime novel where World War II didn’t end quite the way we know, JFK lived and married Marilyn Monroe and when the state of Israel collapsed, a colony of Jews were given a temporary home in a district of Alaska. With us so far? Don’t worry. It’s pure noir, with a detective who’s facing a dead-end in his marriage and career and discovers a chess prodigy was murdered in the hotel room next door. When the authorities tell our hero not to investigate, well, that’s when things get interesting. Chabon doesn’t transcend genre; he celebrates it.

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

OK, maybe journalists have a soft spot for other journalists turned successful writers. On the other hand, absolutely everyone loves Hiaasen’s comic romps. Long before Florida Man became a thing, this Florida man was turning the Sunshine State into the kookiest, funniest, weirdest place on earth. Tourist Season is typically nutty, with eco-terrorist organization Las Noches de Diciembre determined to save Florida’s environment from total destruction by creating chaos with kidnappings, murders and related mayhem. That should keep the tourists away!

The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

The breakthrough novel by Hawkins was lazily compared to Gone Girl, dismissed by some as misogynist because its main female character is a mess and then treated suspiciously for being so wildly successful. Put all that aside (along with an unsatisfying film version) and what remains is a classic thriller. It plays with multiple unreliable narrators, enough twists for a rollercoaster and provides a terrific update of the classic paranoia of Gaslight—justified paranoia, just to be clear.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

Director Quentin Tarantino is threatening to stop making movies after delivering one more film. Well, in our opinion, his tenth and final film should be a remake of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It’s a classic crime novel by Higgins that put Boston on the map for noir back in 1970. The dialogue is sterling, the black humor right up Tarantino’s alley and the story of a criminal who can avoid prison if he gives up one of his more powerful associates is tense, riveting and filled with so many great characters that everyone Tarantino has ever worked with will get a plum role. Hailed immediately as a classic and guess what? They were right.

Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes

It would be surprising if Helen MacInnes didn’t write espionage thrillers. Her husband was an academic who doubled as a spy for MI6 while ensconced at Oxford and then Columbia University in the U.S. They toured Europe between wars, and she was so appalled at the rise of Nazis and fascism that MacInnes took copious notes, determined to write something that would alert the world to the dangers of Hitler, et al. A small push from her husband and MacInnes was off, producing a novel roughly every two years from 1941 until the year before her death in 1985. Like Hitchcock, she loved placing innocent people in the middle of intrigue, like the newlyweds in Above Suspicion, who were asked to casually check in on a spy undercover in Austria. Events do not transpire calmly. “Helen MacInnes was the queen of the mid-20th century espionage thrillers,” says Sarah Young of The Raven bookstore. “Her novels are stunningly good, and Above Suspicion is one of the best.”

Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory

Here’s the pitch: Spoonbenders is like the Redford-Newman movie The Sting, but with psychics. And a cute dog. And a raygun straight out of Buck Rogers! It’s so unclassifiable and fun you might find it at the bookstore filed under fiction or mystery or even sci-fi, but you should definitely find it now and start reading. It tells of the Telemachus family, who were exposed as telekinetic frauds on The Mike Douglas Show in the 1970s. Now it’s the 1990s and this sad-sack group is burdened by the memory of what might have been. Oh, and they’re burdened by actual psychic powers. (They weren’t all faking it.) In this winning, funny and grounded novel, the rough life of the Telemachus family is beset by dangers like the Mafia, shadowy government agencies and even the allure of online dating. It’s a joyride, but it’s also aching and lovely and sweet and filled with memorable characters. Spoonbenders is a cult favorite but that will change the minute Hollywood wises up and turns it into a movie.

The Blank Wall by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding

Holding is celebrated, at least by aficionados. In the 1940s, no less than Raymond Chandler said she was the best suspense writer of them all. Recently, the Library of America included her in an omnibus collecting four of the best thrillers by women from the 1940s. Holding keeps getting rediscovered when she should be a permanent part of the pantheon. Take The Blank Wall: Anyone with a pulse will thrill to this story of a woman during WWII doing Mrs. Miniver one better when it comes to protecting her family. “Yes, it’s one of the great lost classics of noir,” says author Megan Abbott. “But we also see, more discreetly, her sneaking pleasure in navigating the dark underbelly of her safe world. It’s riveting and complex and forever relevant. Also: there are two worthy movie adaptations: The Reckless Moment (1949) and The Deep End (2001).”

Forty Words For Sorrow by Giles Blunt

Indigenous people may or may not have 40 words for snow. But it does inspire a great line in this bleak novel that launched a series. When Canadian detective John Cardinal is yet again the bearer of bad news, he thinks, “What people really need is 40 words for sorrow.” A few years before Louise Penny staked out Quebec with Inspector Gamache, Blunt placed his protagonist in a fictional town in Ontario. Ignored by higher-ups and even suspected of taking bribes, Cardinal fights to have the puzzle of a missing Chippewa girl taken seriously and not dismissed as just another runaway. Righteous anger and a search for justice are key reasons the thriller genre is richer and better than ever.

The Hunter by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark)

Did Westlake have a split personality? Under his own name, Westlake often delivered comic capers of the highest craft. And while he employed numerous pen names throughout his prolific career, Westlake saved the lean, tough, really brutal stuff for books written by “Richard Stark.” Almost all of those featured Parker, a vengeful criminal who really hates being double-crossed. In fact, Westlake took a 20-year break from Parker novels when that inner voice just didn’t show up. (Adapting a Jim Thompson novel into the classic film The Grifters helped bring it back.) For author Daryl Gregory (Revelator), the best thriller of all time is in fact the entire Parker series. “Each book is a dose of the pure stuff,” says Gregory, “and I can’t choose a favorite. This one is the first.”

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Kipling is often dismissed today as an apologist for the British Empire. His work is far more complex and nuanced than that though and it would be a shame to miss out on Kim, a key work in the history of the spy novel. Against the backdrop of the Great Game (Britain and Russia striving to dominate Central Asia), we have the story of an Irish orphan stranded in India. Kim is immersed in the country’s dazzling diversity and becomes a willing player for the Brits when his ability to pass for Indian himself proves useful. While a reference to Kim’s “white” blood making him superior most certainly reveals the aforementioned prejudice, the vast majority of the novel is a love letter to India. It shows Kipling’s utmost respect for the country’s religions, people, languages, culture and so much more, all while revealing in fascinating detail Kim’s training as a spy. One of the great entertainments.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

King outdoes the The Day of The Jackal with this 2011 release. It’s possible some readers in 1971 didn’t realize that world leader Charles de Gaulle was alive and well and living in Paris when The Day of The Jackal came out detailing an attempted assassination plot. But surely, in 2011, everyone in America realized John. F. Kennedy was long dead. So, a time-traveling novel about an attempt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald (and others, if that’s your thing) should be completely lacking in tension, right? Nope! In recent years, King has delivered one masterful novel after another in the crime-thriller category, but suspense is his bread and butter. We might have chosen Mr. Mercedes, the 2014 book which rightly won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel. But everything about 11/22/63 stands out: King’s attention to historic detail, the 800-plus pages that make sustaining the tension all the more remarkable, and the painful truth that the past can’t be fixed, only the future.

A Clean Kill In Tokyo (Rain Fall) by Barry Eisler

Assassins rank right up there with serial killers when it comes to jobs that endlessly fascinate. And Eisler crafted a distinctive one right from the start of his John Rain series. Rain is half-Japanese and half-American, guaranteeing this loner will never quite fit in anywhere. Rain is also haunted by his military past, as is slowly revealed in this gripping novel. Rain has a code (don’t all assassins?). And in his case, he won’t kill women or children, he won’t work on a job also assigned to others and he won’t kill anyone to send a message. The target has to be the target, the principal. Of course, rules only get you so far. After his latest assignment is completed, Rain finds himself romantically involved with the dead man’s daughter. Eisler passionately describes modern Tokyo, and you’re completely sucked into a world and a series still going strong with 2021’s The Chaos Kind.

Get Carter(Jack’s Return Home) by Ted Lewis

Just stand aside when author David Peace (Tokyo Redux) gets on a roll discussing this novel by Ted Lewis. “The 1971 film Get Carter, starring Michael Caine and directed by Mike Hodges, is rightly hailed as one of the greatest British films ever made,” says Peace. “But Jack’s Return Home, the book on which it is based, and its author Ted Lewis, are both still not cherished and celebrated enough. Because make no mistake: Jack’s Return Home is the finest British crime novel ever written.” Crime fans might know the story from the film version, but both the novel and the film were like bathtub gin to critics and audiences at the time—too, too strong. It played the drive-in circuit. And despite Caine’s stardom thanks to Alfie, this story of an unrepentant gangster heading home to figure out who offed the little brother he didn’t even really like just didn’t click. Indeed, audiences embraced the Blaxploitation version made in 1972 more readily. Over the years, the book and the film have steadily risen in popularity. “Jack’s Return Home is where British Noir begins,” says Peace, “and the one book every crime fan should read. And read again. And again.”

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

A young woman has gone missing. Too many news stories begin that way. But not many crime novels mine this fearful event for such a rich look at the world we live in. The comparisons came fast and furious for Cara Hoffman’s debut, including everything from Winter’s Bone (it’s set in a small town in upstate New York) to The Lovely Bones (a missing girl novel narrated by the missing girl herself, now in heaven) to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (our protagonist is a journalist who moved to the town so she could document the environmental damage caused by a local dairy). Whatever the comparison, author Paula Hawkins (A Slow Fire Burning) remains moved by it. “When I first read this novel, I lay awake at night thinking about it,” Hawkins says. “Sometimes, almost a decade on, I still do, because So Much Pretty is a deeply disturbing book. Hoffman tackles misogyny, vengeance, rural poverty and familial love to devastating (and unforgettable) effect.”

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Levin delivered a string of hugely popular works, from the crime classic A Kiss Before Dying and the iconic 1972 The Stepford Wives to the clone thriller The Boys from Brazil and the Broadway smash Deathtrap, a loving spoof of mysteries. But author Robin Cook (Viral), then a young surgical resident looking to catch some shut-eye, was forever changed by this horror-suspense novel. “I happened upon an abandoned copy of Rosemary’s Baby, and in a misguided idea that it might calm me down enough to get some sleep, I started it,” Cook says. “Adhering to the cliché, I couldn’t put it down. Not only did the experience make me into a thriller-suspense fan, but I believe it also played a role in my becoming a thriller-suspense writer myself.”

Out by Kirino Natsuo

Kirino’s been dubbed the Queen of Japanese Crime, and the happy truth is that she’s at the vanguard of a group of talented female authors in that country. Most of her books haven’t been translated into English yet, but her breakthrough work Out is a hit all around the world. A woman who toils away at a bento factory comes home to an abusive husband who announces he’s lost all their money gambling. Then something snaps. She strangles him to death and turns to three female coworkers for help in disposing of the body. They gruesomely chop it up and bundle the parts into various garbage bags secreted all over town. That’s when the trouble starts. As a loan shark comes calling, the women begin blackmailing one another and the cops get a little suspicious. It’s as fun and dark as it sounds.

Road To Perdition by Max Allan Collins; art by Richard Piers Rayner

Comic books and graphic novels practically revel in crime stories, from the vigilantism of Batman to the noir world of Sin City. But for fans of thrillers and suspense who aren’t typically readers of comic books, perhaps the best introduction is Road To Perdition. In it, an enforcer in organized crime during the Great Depression is betrayed and must go on the lam with his young son in tow. The attention to period detail and the way suspense can mount without a single word being said are prime examples of the power of comics. Perdition has spun off sequels, midquels (comics showing other action while the original book took place), two prose sequels and a solid-but-not-nearly-as-great movie starring Tom Hanks.

The Fourth Wall by Barbara Paul

​With so many women dominating the bestseller lists with great crime novels, it’s no surprise they’re lifting up some of the less well-known women who paved the way. That’s why author Charlaine Harris (The Russian Cage) loves talking about this hidden gem, set in the world of theater. In The Fourth Wall, someone is sabotaging a playwright’s newest production by killing off key players. So the writer turns sleuth to solve the crimes and save the day. After all, the show must go on. “This novel had a huge impact on the way I wrote women,” Harris says. “Paul’s protagonist is a playwright, a reader, a scholar—and an adult woman. The murders taking place in the cast of her play offend her to the core. Every time I read The Fourth Wall I’m deeply impressed.”

Tell No One by Harlan Coben

Coben was doing quite nicely. He had an ongoing series about Myron Bolitar, a pro basketball player turned sports agent. His work was winning awards. The future was laid out very nicely. And then, like a thunderbolt, he got the idea: a killer hook for a stand-alone thriller. It became Tell No One, the story of a husband anguished by the murder of his wife. Years later, he receives a cryptic email suggesting she’s still alive, an email containing a phrase only they shared and a warning to tell no one. It’s a page-turner of the first order and the thriller that launched Coben into a name-brand bestselling author. Reading this is a pleasure.

Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles

Well, there’s no mystery when we know the murderer right from the start! But Malice Aforethought remains a classic crime novel, thanks to its delicious irony. It begins with one of the most famous opening lines in thrillerdom: “It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Doctor Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter.” Will he get away with it? Are we rooting for him? (His wife is awfully unpleasant.) Isn’t that wrong? Everyone gets their just desserts, including the reader who can feel the guilty pleasure of seeing the not-so-good doctor get away with it. And yet, not.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow) by Peter Høeg

Earlier Scandinavian thrillers occasionally broke through in the U.S., but Smilla’s Sense of Snow was the Big Bang, the book that made Nordic Noir a permanent part of the crime novel landscape. The movie didn’t do it justice and we even got skittish over the enigmatic title. (Is Smilla’s Sense of Snow an improvement or any clearer than Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow? Not really.) Half Inuit and half Dutch, Smilla doesn’t really fit in anywhere. That outsider status makes her perfect for poking into the seemingly accidental death of a child. With her enigmatic, strange and satisfying story, Smilla opened up Denmark and its people to us and opened up the rest of the world to the flood of great Nordic thrillers that came in its wake.

The Eight by Katherine Neville

Neville’s best-selling debut has been compared to everything from Alexandre Dumas to Umberto Eco to Raiders Of The Lost Ark. And if that starts your heart thumping with delight, you are in for a treat. Set in both the 1970s and the 1790s, it involves an invaluable chess set once owned by Charlemagne, mysterious powers, intrigue and enough conspiracies to power a dozen Da Vinci Codes and National Treasures. Kathy Harig of Mystery Loves Company bookstore simply calls it stunning. “This tour de force of a thriller sets the bar for many modern quest novels to come. The author’s breadth of knowledge of history glows on every page.”

The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins

OK, a WWII thriller about German soldiers hoping to kidnap Winston Churchill and spirit him to Nazi Germany is far-fetched. But Higgins (aka Henry Patterson) details the plot so convincingly that the book became a massive hit, selling more than 50 million copies and becoming one of the bestselling books of all time. That’s a good trick. But the best trick is that the unlikely protagonist is Liam Devlin, a fervent Irish Republican Army member working in Berlin as a teacher of Gaelic. Even more surprising, Devlin (played by Donald Sutherland in the film version) would be featured in three more novels and then mentor IRA assassin Sean Dillon (who has starred in 22 thrillers, right up to 2016’s The Midnight Bell).

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

By law, we must refer to this debut novel by Tinti as “Dickensian.” Besides, it’s that good: An early American spin on Oliver Twist set in New England where an orphan boy with one hand is trained in the art of cons and thievery. It’s delightfully filled with heroes and villains and a lad with a good heart who yearns to find out who he is and what really happened to his hand. Can you blame him? Tinti followed this up nine years later with a marvelous modern noir about a father and daughter on the lam titled The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. So Tinti covers the waterfront from Robert Louis Stevenson to Tarantino. We can’t wait to see what she delivers next.

IPCRESS File by Len Deighton

Deighton delivered a lot of great thrillers, and we were tempted to list his 1980s trilogy Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match. But nothing equals the genius of his debut novel The IPCRESS File. Deighton came up with the ultimate outsider in the world of British society: a working-class bloke set amidst the toffs of British intelligence. Deighton based the idea on his own experience being the only top person at an ad agency who wasn’t educated at Eton. Embodied to perfection by Michael Caine in the film version, the character dubbed Harry starred in a string of novels and films to wonderful comic effect. James Bond he isn’t but Harry is a lot funnier – and who can’t appreciate someone great at their job and annoyed by bosses who are terrible at theirs?

Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace

Peace is praised to high-heaven by U.S. critics but hasn’t earned nearly the high profile here that he’s gained in the U.K. His Tokyo Trilogy (detective novels set during the U.S. occupation of Japan) should have put him over the top. But any crime fan will relish the Red Riding Quartet, a string of novels beginning with Nineteen Seventy-Four that are set against the Yorkshire Ripper Murders. A very good miniseries starring Andrew Garfield is available, but Peace’s riveting tale of police corruption and a serial killer on the loose is too rich and satisfying to miss.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

In World War I, the Alice Network was a real spy ring of women who kept the Allied forces informed on troop movements and other vital information in German-occupied France and Belgium. Quinn took this fascinating story and merged it with the tale of a woman in 1947 searching for her cousin who went missing during World War II. That doubles the suspense while highlighting the challenges women always face in life and in war.  “This historical thriller is a powerful story of personal redemption,” says Sarah Young of The Raven bookstore. “I could not put it down.”

Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon

A master of the historical thriller, Kanon has shone with thrillers like The Good German (the film botched it completely!) and Istanbul Passage. Approaching his tenth novel, Kanon had it all right from his award-winning start with Los Alamos, which Barbara Peters of The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Ariz., calls an “intense, well-researched, intelligent and slow-burn thriller” about the building of the first atomic bomb. “Think of Alan Furst, Philip Kerr and the late John Le Carré,” she says.

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Another massive bestseller, Gorky Park gave a glimpse into the crumbling Soviet Union just as the Cold War reached its peak—and gave us a sympathetic Russian hero while doing so. Author Mick Herron (Slough House) returns to it again and again. “This remains for me the high-water mark of the thriller,” says Herron, “a combination of classic tropes (honest cop working within a corrupt system) and original setting (Soviet-era Moscow). Many writers attempted to pull off similar tricks after this proved such a hit, but few succeeded. Forty years on, after five or six readings, Gorky Park still thrills. I expect it always will.”

The Expats by Chris Pavone

The international thriller isn’t dead, it just got married—and that complicates things immensely. Pavone’s debut combines the double life of a spy with the sometimes cloak-and-dagger nature of marriage. You can’t be honest about everything, can you? After a couple relocates from the U.S. to the tax haven of Luxembourg, it all seems too good to be true. Of course, it is, especially when new friends prove a little too intrusive. Our hero worries her deep dark secret might spill out, but why exactly does her husband seem to have a deep dark secret of his own? That’s her job. Twisty and fun, Pavone’s novel excels at playing off the demands of work and home, even when work is, you know, top secret.

The Collector by John Fowles

Before Fowles won over hippies with The Magus and then wowed the world with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he penned a shockingly intimate look at a psychotic young man who kidnaps the woman of his obsessions and locks her in his cellar. Disturbing and empathetic, it splits essentially in two, with half the novel told from the point of view of the “collector” and the other half from the woman he’s holding against her will. Creepy and cool, it’s as hard to shake as the stalker himself.

Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Nothing invigorates the crime genre quite like a fresh setting, a fresh pair of eyes and fresh difficulties we haven’t seen protagonists deal with before. That’s what makes this debut so exciting. Weiden is an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation and his creation Virgil Wounded Horse is a familiar figure with new complexities. Half Lakota, half white, the man is an enforcer—the muscle you call in when the U.S. legal system or the tribal council fail you or don’t even try. But life on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota gets complicated when heroin comes pouring in and the nephew Virgil is raising starts drowning in it. Pairing up with the ex-girlfriend he still loves, fighting his own addiction to alcohol and navigating a minefield of some tribal leaders with their own agenda, Virgil not only needs to find and stop the drug dealers, he needs to find himself, too.

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The famous espionage novels by Greene roll off the tongue easily: The Quiet American, The Confidential Agent, the screenplay and novel for The Third Man to name a few. But author Giles Blunt (Vanishing Act) puts his money down on 1978’s The Human Factor, in which a mid-level bureaucrat in MI6 works for his country but also feels a duty to the Communists who helped his wife escape apartheid South Africa. “It’s free of his Catholic-convert angst and, like the best of le Carré, brings the big picture of international espionage home to the bland ‘little’ people pushing paper in the office,” says Blunt. As a spy novel free of violence, it’s a rebuke both to gun-toting secret agents and the West’s cynical attitude toward South Africa.

Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson

Watson put his own clever spin on memory loss with this story of a woman whose mind is erased every morning. She wakes up not recognizing the man beside her or even her own face and must slowly piece together the facts: she’s 47 and many years ago an accident left her with this terrible burden of forgetting. But wait, some things her loving husband tells her simply don’t add up. And they don’t quite gibe with the diary she struggles to keep. And why would her therapy sessions be kept a secret from him? Ingenious twists made this 2011 update on gaslighting an out-of-the-box hit that turned Watson into a name-brand author from the start, if we remember correctly.

Miami Blues by Charles Willeford

Is it cruel or pretty awesome that Willeford lived just long enough to see his work gain long overdue success? He’d been delivering oddball crime novels since the 1950s, and while other writers noticed, readers weren’t exactly clamoring for the latest Willeford. Author Padgett Powell (Indigo) appreciates the balance Willeford struck: “These books featured heroes that Willeford seemed to want to position just this side of the indecency fence—the likable unlikeable fellow,” Powell says. “It was a delicate titration reminiscent somewhat of Bukowski and his you-want-to-love-them drunks. But Willeford has a larger range. The whole nasty Western world is in view, not just the bottle.” Like so many crime writers before him, Willeford struck paydirt when he launched the Hoke Moseley series in 1984. In Miami Blues, our hangdog hero faces the indignity of a killer who knocks him out and steals not just Moseley’s gun and badge but even his dentures(!). Out of nowhere, Willeford was hot. Three more books followed along with actual reviews, publicity, movie deals and the biggest payday of his career. Then he died of a heart attack in March 1988 just days after his final book hit the stores. At least he might have died smiling.

The Kill Artist by Daniel Silva

One of the pleasures of the thriller genre is the chance for an ongoing series that maintains a high quality without spinning its wheels. Since he began the Gabriel Allon novels in 2000, Silva has not disappointed. His hero is an assassin and spy for the Office (aka Mossad), using work as an art restorer for cover. Silva is an adult convert to Judaism and his character is in a way new to the religion as well, having been raised in a secular household. The novels are steeped in the Middle East (where Silva worked as a journalist) but also outside current events, giving them a timeless quality. Haunted by a terrorist attack that killed his son and drove his wife mad, Allon is a tortured man whose gift for killing is the polar opposite of his ability to bring artwork back to life.

The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard

We began with Ian Fleming because most people have fantasized—even if just for a moment—about being a James Bond-level secret agent. And we end with Leonard because every writer on this list has probably fantasized—even if just for a moment—about being Leonard. Masterful at dialogue, great at plotting, overflowing with memorable characters, funny, tense, enduring—the fiction of this master has it all. And no matter which one you pick, someone is going to mention another. What about Get Shorty? Or Out Of Sight? Rum Punch? Or the Westerns? What about the Westerns? We’re choosing 2005’s The Hot Kid just to remind everyone that Leonard didn’t miss a step even toward the end of his career. Set during the Depression, it follows the wunderkind lawman Carl Webster as he deals with a persistent criminal determined not to pull off the big job for his own sake but just so he can become public enemy number one. Hey, it’s good to have goals. The Hot Kid is funny, violent, insightful about myth-making and spot-on in its period detail. Like so much of Leonard’s work, it just doesn’t get any better than this. Check out:

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