Genre Hub

Thriller

Psychological suspense, spy fiction, legal drama, and crime thrillers. Books engineered to keep you reading past midnight and thinking for days after.

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Reading List

The Thriller Top 50

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The essential thriller reads, curated and ranked. How many have you read?

Gone Girl
1
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
The Silence of the Lambs
3
The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris
The Girl on the Train
4
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Rebecca
5
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
The Talented Mr. Ripley
6
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
Big Little Lies
7
Big Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
The Secret History
8
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
Strangers on a Train
9
Strangers on a Train
Patricia Highsmith
In Cold Blood
10
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
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Go deeper

Essential Thrillers

The thriller is the genre that most honestly reflects our anxieties — about power, identity, safety, and the strangers we live among. At its best it's literary fiction that doesn't apologise for being compulsively readable.

For psychological thrillers: Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl reset the genre. If you haven't read it, do. Then move to Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad — In the Woods is the best crime novel of the last twenty years.

For spy fiction: John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the gold standard — patient, intelligent, devastating. For something more propulsive, Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series or Jason Bourne by Robert Ludlum.

For literary thrillers: Don DeLillo's Libra and Donna Tartt's The Secret History show what the genre looks like when literary ambition and plot urgency pull in the same direction.

Writer's Tool

Thriller Prompt Generator

Stuck on a plot? Generate a thriller prompt to get you started.

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From the blog

Thriller Reading Lists

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