10 Best Thrillers of All Time

Cover of The Maltese Falcon

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A thriller has to work twice. The first time, you’re desperate to know what happens. The second time, you already know, and it still has to hold you.

That’s the test I used for this list of the best thrillers of all time. Most of the books below have been in print for decades, and several have been adapted and imitated so often that you’ve probably absorbed the plot without reading them. The ten were first published between 1915 and 2012, and they cover spies, assassins, lawyers, a con man and a missing wife.

Two kinds of thriller have their own guides, so you won’t find the same books in all three. Our list of the best crime thriller books is built around detectives and cases, and our best psychological thriller books is for unreliable narrators and unsettling people. This one is the all-rounder, and no book appears in more than one of the three.

Short on time? Read And Then There Were None for a puzzle, The Day of the Jackal for pure tension, or Gone Girl for the twist everyone talks about.

Goodreads ratings were checked on 13 October 2026.

The 10 books at a glance

#	Book	Author	Best for	Goodreads
1	And Then There Were None	Agatha Christie	A perfect closed-circle puzzle	4.27
2	Rebecca	Daphne du Maurier	Slow gothic dread	4.25
3	The Thirty-Nine Steps	John Buchan	The original man-on-the-run chase	3.59
4	The Day of the Jackal	Frederick Forsyth	Tension when you know the ending	4.27
5	The Talented Mr Ripley	Patricia Highsmith	A villain you end up rooting for	3.96
6	The Silence of the Lambs	Thomas Harris	Two minds circling each other	4.26
7	Gone Girl	Gillian Flynn	A midpoint twist	4.15
8	Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy	John le Carré	Patient, intricate spy fiction	4.06
9	The Maltese Falcon	Dashiell Hammett	Hard-boiled detective fiction	3.86
10	Presumed Innocent	Scott Turow	A courtroom thriller	4.09

What makes a thriller one of the best of all time

Plenty of thrillers are fun for a weekend. The ones that last tend to share a few things:

A premise you can say in one sentence. Ten strangers on an island. An assassin and a president. A prosecutor accused of the murder he’s investigating.
A character you can’t look away from. Usually someone you shouldn’t trust, or someone who’s very good at something you shouldn’t admire.
Pressure that doesn’t let up. Not always speed. Sometimes it’s a slow tightening, as in Rebecca or Tinker Tailor.
An ending that survives a second read. If the twist is the only thing the book has, it’s gone once you know it.

All ten books below clear that bar, in very different ways.

The 10 best thrillers of all time

1. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Cover of And Then There Were None

4.27 on Goodreads from more than 1.7 million ratings. First published 1939.

Ten strangers are invited to Soldier Island, a small island off the Devon coast, by hosts who never turn up. On the first night a recorded voice accuses each of them of causing a death and getting away with it. A nursery rhyme about ten soldier boys hangs in every bedroom, and the guests start dying in the order of the verses.

Christie later wrote that she chose the idea because it was so hard to pull off: ten people have to die without the story turning silly. She manages it. There is no detective to rely on and no way off the island, so you spend the book working out who is still alive and who is doing it. It is usually described as the best-selling mystery novel of all time, with reported sales above 100 million. It was first published in the UK under a different title, which was dropped long ago.

If this one hooks you, our ranking of the best Agatha Christie books is the place to go next.

2. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Cover of Rebecca

4.25 on Goodreads from more than 770,000 ratings. First published 1938.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It is one of the best opening lines in fiction, and the book earns it. A young woman, who is never given a first name and is only ever the second Mrs de Winter, marries a wealthy widower and moves into his Cornish estate. Everything there still seems to belong to his first wife, Rebecca, and the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, makes sure the new bride knows it.

Nothing much happens for long stretches, and it still frightens you. Du Maurier works through atmosphere: a bedroom kept exactly as it was, a dress worn to a ball for the wrong reasons, a husband who goes quiet at the wrong moments. Then you find out what Rebecca was actually like, and the whole book changes shape. Hitchcock filmed it in 1940, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture.

It is slower than most of the books here, and it’s best read when you have a few evenings.

3. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

Cover of The Thirty-Nine Steps

3.59 on Goodreads from about 49,000 ratings. First published 1915.

Richard Hannay is a mining engineer, newly home in London and bored. Then a neighbour called Scudder, who says he is a spy, tells him about a plot to assassinate a foreign statesman and, behind that, to steal Britain’s war plans. Days later Scudder is dead on Hannay’s floor, and Hannay is the obvious suspect. So he runs, north to Scotland, pursued by the police on one side and the conspirators on the other.

Buchan wrote it while he was ill in bed in 1915 and called it a “shocker”. It is short enough to read in an evening or two, and it is the ancestor of every innocent-man-on-the-run story since, including Hitchcock’s 1935 film of it. The Goodreads score is the lowest on this list, and the reasons are mostly about age: the plotting is sketchy by modern standards, and the book reflects the prejudices of its time in places. Read it as a starting point for the genre, not as the best of it.

4. The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Cover of The Day of the Jackal

4.27 on Goodreads from about 150,000 ratings. First published 1971.

A professional assassin known only as the Jackal is hired by the OAS, a French paramilitary group, to kill President Charles de Gaulle. The book is mostly the mechanics: forged passports, a custom-made rifle hidden in a crutch, and a French detective named Claude Lebel working out who he is hunting from a handful of clues.

You know de Gaulle wasn’t assassinated, so the book shouldn’t work. It does, because Forsyth, a former journalist, writes the preparation with such calm detail that every small obstacle feels dangerous. He reportedly wrote it in about five weeks. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. There’s no twist and no unreliable narrator, which makes it a good test of whether you like thrillers for the plot or for the tricks.

5. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Cover of The Talented Mr Ripley

3.96 on Goodreads from about 128,000 ratings. First published 1955.

Tom Ripley is a small-time con man in New York. A shipping magnate offers to pay for a trip to Italy if he will persuade the man’s son, Dickie Greenleaf, to come home. Tom finds Dickie in a seaside town, befriends him, and gradually starts to want Dickie’s life more than his company.

Highsmith makes you root for Tom, and that is the uncomfortable part. She does it by making him careful, polite and good at improvising, and by putting every scene inside his head, where every close call feels like your own. The book won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1957. It is the first of five Ripley novels, and the best place to meet him.

6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Cover of The Silence of the Lambs

4.26 on Goodreads from more than 600,000 ratings. First published 1988.

Clarice Starling is an FBI trainee, sent to interview Dr Hannibal Lecter, an imprisoned psychiatrist and cannibal, in the hope that he can help the Bureau find a serial killer called Buffalo Bill. Lecter will answer her questions, but only if she answers his, and every exchange costs her something.

That relationship is the book. The hunt for Buffalo Bill supplies the deadline, but Clarice and Lecter circling each other is what people remember. The novel won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel and the Anthony Award for Best Novel, and the 1991 film won all five of the major Oscars. It is graphic in places. It is the second Lecter book, but you don’t need the first to follow it.

7. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Cover of Gone Girl

4.15 on Goodreads from more than 3.5 million ratings. First published 2012.

On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne vanishes from the house she shares with her husband, Nick, and the police look at him first. The book alternates between Nick’s account of the days since and Amy’s diary of the marriage, and the two versions don’t match.

That gap drives everything, and the midpoint turn is one of the best in the genre, so go in knowing as little as you can. It won the 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery & Thriller and was filmed in 2014 with Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. For other books in this vein, see our list of the best psychological thriller books.

8. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

Cover of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

4.06 on Goodreads from about 111,000 ratings. First published 1974.

George Smiley has been pushed out of the Circus, le Carré’s fictional version of British intelligence. Then a Whitehall official tells him there is a Soviet mole at the very top of it, one of the senior men the dead former chief had nicknamed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Poorman. Smiley is asked to find out which, without letting the traitor know he is looking.

Le Carré had worked for both MI5 and MI6, and the book is widely seen as drawing on the Kim Philby affair. It is nothing like a Bond novel. The tension comes from meetings, files and half-remembered conversations, and the plot is dense enough that it rewards a second read. It is the first book in the Karla trilogy, and it was adapted for television in 1979 with Alec Guinness and for film in 2011 with Gary Oldman.

If you find the first fifty pages hard going, keep at it. Once you know who everyone is, it speeds up.

9. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Cover of The Maltese Falcon

3.86 on Goodreads from about 120,000 ratings. First published 1930.

Sam Spade is a San Francisco private detective whose partner, Miles Archer, is shot dead on the first night of a new case. The client, a woman calling herself Miss Wonderly, turns out to be someone else entirely. The trail leads to a small, jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon, and to a group of people who will each lie, flatter or kill to get it.

Hammett had been a Pinkerton detective before he wrote fiction, and the book keeps to what Spade does and says. It never goes inside his head, so you have to read him the way you’d read a stranger. The book first appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1929 and then as a novel in 1930, and John Huston’s 1941 film with Humphrey Bogart is still the version most people know. It set the template for the hard-boiled detective, and many later books on the crime shelf come from it.

10. Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

Cover of Presumed Innocent

4.09 on Goodreads from about 129,000 ratings. First published 1987.

Rusty Sabich is a deputy prosecutor in the fictional Kindle County. When a colleague, Carolyn Polhemus, is found raped and murdered, his boss orders him to investigate. What the office doesn’t know is that Rusty had an affair with her. Soon he is the one being charged, and he narrates the trial from the defendant’s chair.

Turow was a federal prosecutor in Chicago before he wrote it, and it shows in the detail of how a case is built and attacked. The book is quiet and procedural for most of its length, then the ending lands hard. It was filmed in 1990 with Harrison Ford, and again as a TV series in 2024. It is the first book in the Kindle County series, if you want more.

Where to start if you’re new to thrillers

If you want a puzzle with no detective, start with And Then There Were None. If you want pure tension, try The Day of the Jackal. If you want the twist that everyone mentions, go with Gone Girl.

For slow dread and a big house, Rebecca. For slow, patient spycraft, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. For a villain who gets under your skin, The Talented Mr Ripley, or The Silence of the Lambs if you want two of them.

If you’ve read all of those, The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Maltese Falcon are worth going back for. They are shorter and plainer than what came after, but you can see where a lot of the genre came from. If you’re still not sure, the Litloop reading quiz can suggest a next book, and you can browse more titles in our thriller genre hub.

If you log them on Litloop, you’ll also have a more honest record of which ones you actually finished than your memory will give you.

Best thrillers of all time FAQ

What is the best thriller of all time? It depends what you mean by best. For sales, And Then There Were None is hard to beat. For Goodreads readers, it ties with The Day of the Jackal at 4.27. For a modern thriller, Gone Girl is the usual starting point.

What is the oldest book on this list? The Thirty-Nine Steps, first published in 1915. Rebecca (1938) and And Then There Were None (1939) are the oldest of the rest.

Which of these books should I read first? And Then There Were None if you want a quick, clean puzzle, and Gone Girl if you want something modern. Both are standalone novels and neither needs any background.

Which of these books are part of a series? The Thirty-Nine Steps is the first Richard Hannay book, The Talented Mr Ripley is the first of five Ripley novels, The Silence of the Lambs is the second Hannibal Lecter book, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy begins the Karla trilogy, and Presumed Innocent is the first Kindle County novel. All of them can be read on their own. Rebecca, The Day of the Jackal, Gone Girl, The Maltese Falcon and And Then There Were None are standalone.

What’s the difference between a thriller, a crime thriller and a psychological thriller? A thriller is any story built on danger and suspense. A crime thriller centres on a crime and the people trying to solve or commit it, and a psychological thriller gets its tension from what’s going on inside a character’s head or between people. Many books do more than one. We have separate guides to the best crime thriller books and the best psychological thriller books.

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