The Best Thrillers for Your Inner Investigator
From mesmerizing mysteries to chilling crime fiction, discover your next detective story with this dazzling collection.
When the body of reality TV star Desiree Pierce is found on a playground in the Bronx the morning after her twenty-fifth birthday party, the police and the media are quick to declare her death an overdose. A tragedy, certainly, but not a crime.
Yet Columbia grad student Lena—principled, headstrong, and allergic to the spotlight—knows that can’t be the case. Despite the bitter truth that the two hadn’t spoken in two years, they were half-sisters. Lena knew Desiree. And Desiree would never travel above 125th Street. Something is very wrong with the facts. So why is no one listening?
While the two sisters had been torn apart by Desiree’s partying and by their difficult father, Lena becomes determined to find justice for Desiree. Even if that means untangling her family’s darkest secrets—or ending up dead herself.
Now she rarely stays in the same place or uses the same name for long. They’ve killed the only other person she trusted, but something she knows still poses a threat. They want her dead, and soon. When her former handler offers her a way out, she realizes it’s her only chance to erase the giant target on her back. But it means taking one last job for her ex-employers.
To her horror, the information she acquires only makes her situation more dangerous. Resolving to meet the threat head-on, she prepares for the toughest fight of her life but finds herself falling for a man who can only complicate her likelihood of survival. As she sees her choices being rapidly whittled down, she must apply her unique talents in ways she never dreamed of.
In this tautly plotted novel, Meyer creates a fierce and fascinating new heroine with a very specialized skill set. And she shows once again why she’s one of the world’s bestselling authors.
Retired Delta Force operator, Master Sergeant Jonathan “Jad” Bell, is Wilsonville’s lead undercover security officer. The threat begins with the announcement of a hidden dirty bomb, but quickly becomes something far, far worse.
Trained since the age of seventeen to save innocent victims from impossible hostage situations, Jad scrambles to assess the threat and protect the visitors. He will come face to face with a villain whose training matches his in every way-and presents a threat Jad may not be able to stop.
Malcolm Fox is feeling useless. Shunned by his colleagues because of his past in the Complaints bureau, he’s been reassigned to a grunt detail, helping a surveillance team—one that trusts him even less than his own boss does—track a notorious Glasgow crime family. Helping Clarke with the Minton case is the only thing that makes Fox feel like a real cop.
Newly minted civilian John Rebus is feeling restless. Being a cop is in his blood and he’s failing miserably at retirement. So when Clarke and Fox ask for his help, Rebus doesn’t need long to consider his options. But before he can get his bearings, a call comes from Rebus’s old nemesis—”Big Ger” Cafferty. Someone just fired a bullet through his front window—and sent him a note identical to Minton’s. The normally unflappable old gangster is on edge, but for the life of him Cafferty can’t figure out who he’s wronged. And the only man he trusts with his life is Rebus.
As the cases collide, it’s up to Clarke, Fox, and Rebus to connect the dots and save their unlikely ally Cafferty, whose past harbors a shocking secret that implicates Minton’s friends in an unspeakable crime. Even Dogs in the Wild reunites crime fiction legend Ian Rankin’s greatest characters in an explosive story exploring the darkest corners of our desires.
In a courtroom, David Sloane can grab a jury and make it dance. He can read jurors’ expressions, feel their emotions, know their thoughts. With this remarkable ability, Sloane gets juries to believe the unbelievable, excuse the inexcusable, and return the most astonishing verdicts.
The only barrier to Sloane’s professional success is his conscience—until he gets a call from a man later found dead, and his life rockets out of control.
An irresistible story of love and death, this Easy Rawlins mystery takes place during the devastating 1965 Watts riots. Easy’s hunt for a killer reveals a new city emerging from the ashes—and a new life for Easy and his friends.
Salvation Boulevard is a page-turning thriller in the tradition of John Grisham and Richard Condon that grapples with the ecstatic and entropic nature of religious faith in contemporary America.
Jackson’s current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, is fairly standard-issue, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network—and back across the path of his old friend Reggie. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking novel by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today.
“Thank goodness the long Jackson Brodie hiatus is over.”—Janet Maslin, New York Times
The culprit seems to be a drifter from South’s childhood; the victim was the only person connecting South to his early crime; and a troubled, vivacious new female sergeant has been relocated from London and assigned to work with South. As our hero investigates, he must work ever-harder to keep his own connections to the victim, and his past, a secret.
The Birdwatcher is British crime fiction at its finest; a stirring portrait of flawed, vulnerable investigators; a meticulously constructed mystery; and a primal story of fear, loyalty and vengeance.
Trying to bail his brother out, Mike quickly finds himself playing a dangerous game, trapped into planning the heist himself, forced to call on all the skills of his criminal past in order to escape. In this sharp, fast-paced sequel to The 500, Mike Ford again stars as the cunning and courageous former con man with a big heart, and Matthew Quirk confirms that he is one of the most exciting thriller writers at work today.
Desperate to clear her name and to get at the truth, Maureen traces rumors about a similar murder at a local psychiatric hospital, uncovering a trail of deception and repressed scandal that could exonerate her—or make her the next victim.
But both Lina and Cain have been keeping secrets, secrets that won’t be put off by fresh paint or a new alarm system. And someone has been watching them—their mundane tasks, their intimate moments. When a visit takes a deadly turn, Lina realizes someone out there knows something they shouldn’t…and that welcoming strangers into your home is playing a dangerous game.
As he works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines, tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he’s hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won’t reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw’s case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child—who may be Victor’s salvation.
Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country’s arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost.
