They may be words on a page, but thriller books deliver the same adrenaline rushas your favorite movie or television series. Over the past decade, the genre has continually reinvented itself, pushing beyond familiar formulas to tell stories that are as emotional as they are suspenseful.
Traditionally, a successful thriller was defined by its twists and turns. Today, the best thrillers do more than keep readers guessing about the perpetrator — they also expose the larger systems, institutions, and human flaws that make such crimes possible. Without further ado, here are the 10 greatest thriller books of the past 10 years, ranked.
Advertisement
10
‘The Guest List’ (2020)
Book cover of The Guest List by Lucy Foley, showing a stormy island with a castle viewed across dark water beneath heavy rain and mist, with the title in bold yellow lettering.Image via HarperCollins
On a remote Irish island, a glamorous wedding becomes a marital nightmare when a storm traps guests with their darkest secrets. As betrayals, hidden pasts, and long-buried resentments come to light, nearly everyone has a reason to want the groom dead. Told through multiple perspectives, The Guest List is a locked-room thriller where death literally does a couple part.
The Guest List explores the hidden horrors lurking beneath the prestige of elite boarding schools. For all their perceived exclusivity, these institutions can become breeding grounds for cruelty when toxic behavior goes unchecked. Set against the pressure-cooker backdrop of a storm-stranded wedding, the novel reveals that some marriages are doomed long before anyone says, “I do.”
Advertisement
9
‘Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone’ (2022)
Book cover of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, showing a blue typewriter with the title emerging from the paper on a bright red background scattered with bullet casings.Image via Mariner Books
Ernest Cunningham’s holiday is cut short in Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. At a snowbound family reunion in an Australian ski resort, Ernest is forced to confront the one thing every relative shares: each of them has killed someone. Already estranged after testifying against his brother, Ern is pulled into another mystery when a frozen body is discovered outside the lodge.
Giving Knives Out energy, everyone is effectively locked inside a resort that grows increasingly claustrophobic. As the blizzard’s piercing winds batter the walls, it’s only a matter of time before the isolation begins to take its toll. But for these cold-blooded potential murderers, the weather is nothing compared to the buried secrets waiting to surface.
Advertisement
8
‘The Last House on Needless Street’ (2021)
Book cover of The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward, featuring a shadowy Victorian house illuminated by greenish light with a black cat sitting in the foreground.Image via Nightfire
No amount of therapy can help Dee Walters in The Last House on Needless Street. Eleven years after her younger sister vanished without a trace, Dee becomes convinced that her reclusive neighbor, Ted Bannerman, is responsible. Determined to uncover the truth, she begins stalking him. What started as her personal vendetta spirals into a shocking realization.
Unbeknownst to Dee, Ted is battling dissociative identity disorder born from years of horrific childhood abuse. As he struggles to distinguish reality from the identities that protect him, Dee’s obsession with uncovering the truth about her sister’s disappearance drives her to the darkest parts of herself.
Advertisement
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Advertisement
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
Advertisement
🎭Ethan Hunt
Advertisement
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
Advertisement
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
Advertisement
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
Advertisement
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
Advertisement
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
Advertisement
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
Advertisement
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
Advertisement
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
Advertisement
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
Advertisement
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Advertisement
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Advertisement
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Advertisement
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
Advertisement
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Advertisement
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Advertisement
7
‘The Plot’ (2021)
Book cover of The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, showing a city skyline behind a giant torn book page displaying the title in tall red letters against a blue sky.Image via Celadon Books
The plot truly thickens in The Plot. The dead can come alive in more ways than one. Once a promising novelist, Jacob Finch Bonner is now a struggling writing professor haunted by creative failure. When he learns that a former student with a brilliant story idea has died before publishing it, Jacob steals the plot for himself.
Advertisement
As luck would have it, Jacob strikes it big when his stolen story becomes a bestselling novel. But his success is short-lived after he receives anonymous messages accusing him of literary theft. Jacob never imagined that stealing a manuscript would quite literally make him a target of those whose lives inspired the story.
6
‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’ (2022)
Book cover of Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, featuring a red-orange sky, a clock face, and the silhouette of a house, with the title handwritten in large white lettering.Image via William Morrow
Hell hath no fury like a mother’s grief. In this time-traveling psychological thriller, Wrong Place Wrong Time follows Jen, whose life is torn apart after witnessing her teenage son, Todd, stab a stranger. But instead of waking to the aftermath, she wakes up one day earlier — and then another.
Advertisement
It soon becomes clear that she’s trapped in a time loop, carrying her further and further away from the day of the incident. As Jen tries to figure out what went wrong in the days prior, she discovers new secrets about her family, her marriage, and Todd’s hidden life. Instead of revelations, Jen begins to question her instincts as a mother and whether she ever truly understood what it meant to be one.
5
‘The Chain’ (2019)
Book cover of The Chain by Adrian McKinty, featuring the title in large red letters above a white playground swing suspended by metal chains on a black background.Image via Mulholland Books
The Chain proves that nobody should underestimate a mother’s love for her child. Divorced mother Rachel Klein is undergoing cancer treatment when she learns that her daughter, Kylie, has been kidnapped by a criminal organization known as the Chain. Faced with every parent’s worst nightmare, Rachel is forced into an impossible choice.
Advertisement
To secure Kylie’s release, Rachel must not only pay a ransom but also kidnap another child, perpetuating the Chain’s horrifying cycle. Forced to betray her own morals, she enlists her brother-in-law to carry out the kidnapping. Little does the Chain realize that Rachel has no intention of playing by its rules forever.
4
‘All the Sinners Bleed’ (2023)
Book cover of All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby, featuring a large orange-red setting sun partially obscured by dark tree branches against a blue-black sky.Image via Flatiron Books
All the Sinners Bleed begins with an unfortunate, all-too-familiar reality in America: a school shooting. One year into his tenure as the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia, Titus Crown is called to the scene of the crime, in which a beloved teacher is murdered before the teenage gunman is killed by deputies.
Advertisement
As Titus investigates, he learns that the shooting is just a small part of a larger-scale child abuse conspiracy. One member of the group, whom he calls the “Last Wolf,” is still out there hunting Black children. As Titus chases after the killer, he must also face the town’s racist history, all while surrounded by blatant white supremacy.
3
‘The Silent Patient’ (2019)
Book cover of The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, featuring the title in blue and red lettering on a textured cream background with a faint red handprint behind the word “Silent.”Image via Celadon Books
The Silent Patient has readers questioning what is real and what is not. Six years after shooting her husband, Gabriel, five times, celebrated painter Alicia Berenson is now confined to a psychiatric facility. Stuck in the Grove, Alicia is infamous across the wards for her silence. No therapist has been able to break it.
Advertisement
Determined to “fix” her, psychotherapist Theo Faber takes on the case. Much of the story, especially Alicia’s side, is told from her personal diary entries, gradually revealing the events leading up to Gabriel’s death. But as the truth begins to surface, Alicia realizes this isn’t the first time she crossed paths with Theo.
2
‘The God of the Woods’ (2024)
Book cover of The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, featuring a painted forest scene with lush green trees and a streak of pink paint dripping from the top of the cover.Image via Riverhead Books
Set in the remote Adirondack Mountains, The God of the Woods follows the influential Van Laar family, whose vast forest estate and summer camp dominate the surrounding working-class community. When 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar disappears from Camp Emerson in 1975, the case reopens old wounds from the unsolved disappearance of her brother, Bear, 14 years earlier.
Advertisement
As an inexperienced female investigator searches the sprawling wilderness for answers, she discovers generations of buried family secrets, class tensions, and abuses of privilege that have long been protected by the Van Laars’ wealth and influence. The God of the Woods eventually makes it clear that the greatest danger isn’t from the forest itself.
1
‘Razorblade Tears’ (2021)
Book cover of Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby, featuring bold distressed white lettering over a lonely highway stretching toward a golden sunset with two figures walking in the distance.Image via Flatiron Books
When their gay sons, Isiah and Derek, are executed by members of the white supremacist biker gang known as the Rare Breed, aging ex-convicts Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee are united by grief despite years of mutual resentment. As local law enforcement fails to deliver justice, the Black and white fathers take matters into their own hands.
Advertisement
Razorblade Tears takes readers across rural Virginia, where Ike and Buddy must confront the homophobia and prejudice that drove them to reject their sons. In the midst of their grief, they’re also driven to protect the loved ones their sons left behind, including their young daughter. A testament to unconditional love, Razorblade Tears shows just how far a parent is willing to go in the face of unimaginable loss.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login