16 Thriller Books That'll Give You Instant Goosebumps

There’s a reason Gillian Flynn is a household name: She is the queen of the 21st-century suspense novel, her prose compulsively readable, her troubled heroines—and villainesses—cultural icons in themselves. Whichever of her books is your favorite, there’s no denying that Gone Girl, the zeitgeist-shaping story of a missing woman and the husband under suspicion for her disappearance, is a post-recession classic.

If Gillian Flynn is the queen of modern suspense, Ruth Ware is the knight presiding over the Round Table. Oft likened to a modern-day Agatha Christie, Ware excels at thrillers set within the confines of close spaces—such as The Woman in Cabin 10, set aboard a cruise ship where a travel journalist witnesses a murder. When she can find no evidence that the victim was ever aboard, writer Lo begins to question her own sanity.

We’ve featured this novel before, because it’s just that good: An urgent (and suddenly timely) examination of racial tensions in Los Angeles, Steph Cha’s latest is a page-turner about two families—one Black and one Korean—who must grapple with the legacy of a crime that shook both their families in the months leading up to the 1992 L.A. riots.

Relative newcomer Lucy Foley has honed her unique brand of reverse-whodunit suspense down to a science—and thank goodness for that. As in The Hunting Party, Foley’s breakout thriller from 2018, The Guest List—set at a ritzy wedding-gone-wrong on a remote Scottish isle—starts with a murder, and then plays a game of keep-away with the victim’s identity until the very last pages.

We all owe Caroline Kepnes a debt for penning the source material that gave us Penn Badgley’s terrifying performance as Joe Goldberg on the hit Netflix serial-killer show You—but the original book is nothing to sneeze at either. The first in a series (Books 3 and 4 are on the way, according to Kepnes), this pitch-perfect thriller bucks genre conventions by taking us inside the mind of the killer himself.

God is a woman, but make it “the original master of the psychological thriller.” Though Patricia Highsmith may be best known today as the author of the classic lesbian romance Carol, she actually made a name for herself in the mid-20th century as the author of gripping suspense novels like Strangers on a Train (yes, as in the Hitchcock film) and Deep Water. Not to mention, she is the pen behind the fantastic Ripliad series, which traces the footsteps of a brilliant—and dangerous—con artist.

You already know Attica Locke’s work, whether or not you realize it: The author is also an accomplished screenwriter who counts Empire, When They See Us, and Little Fires Everywhere among her TV credits. But it’s her acclaimed debut novel, set in 1980s Texas and following a down-on-his-luck lawyer who gets in over his head after saving a woman from drowning, that you should know now.

Bad Feminist, this is not. Released the same year as her breakout essay collection, Roxane Gay’s debut novel tells the story of a Haitian-American woman who is kidnapped and subjected to brutal torture when her wealthy Haitian developer father refuses to pay her ransom.

Remember The Nanny Diaries? Well, this is like if someone brushed the pages of that book with arsenic. Inspired by a real-life event that took place on the Upper West Side in 2012, Leïla Slimani’s first book to be published in the United States starts with the unthinkable: A nanny murders the two children in her charge, then attempts to kill herself. The story then jumps back in time several months, inviting readers to try and figure out how—and why—this terrible thing happened.

Who doesn’t love a good “strangers united by a horrifying secret” thriller? In one-time James Patterson collaborator Rachel Howzell Hall’s heart-pumping standalone novel, seven people are invited to travel to a remote private island, only to find that they have been summoned there under false pretenses—and their mysterious host has a deadly agenda.

When it comes to books that thrill and terrify, Stephen King is the GOAT. Newcomers to his work could do worse than to start with Misery, which follows popular writer Paul Sheldon as he gets rescued from a snowy car accident by superfan and former nurse Annie Wilkes—only to discover that he is now in even greater danger.

Part domestic thriller, part Kafka-esque allegory, Han Kang’s Man Booker International Prize–winning three-part novel centers on a woman who decides to become a vegetarian after waking from an awful, blood-drenched nightmare. Sounds innocuous, right? It’s not: The Vegetarian is brutal and unrelenting, following its main character through sexual assault, eating disorders, and psychological torment.

Ah, the unreliable narrator—a staple trope of the suspense genre. When 25-year-old Yu-jin wakes to the discovery of his mother’s dead body at the bottom of the stairs of their sleek apartment, he realizes that he has no recollection of the night before other than the vague memory of his mom calling his name. As he desperately searches for the truth of what happened that night, Yu-jin unearths some family secrets that can’t be reburied.

Toni Cade Bambara’s These Bones Are Not My Child isn’t just a gripping thriller; it’s a masterwork of American literature. (Just ask Toni Morrison—she was Bambara’s editor and longtime friend.) Published posthumously and set against the backdrop of the Atlanta child murders of 1979-1981, Bambara’s last novel follows a mother whose worst nightmare is realized when her teenage son goes missing.

Released in Stieg Larsson’s native Swedish in 2005 and in English in 2008, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo introduced the world to hacker-vigilante Lisbeth Salander—and became a near-instant literary phenomenon in the process. The first novel of Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium series sets Lisbeth and her co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist on the trail of a woman from a wealthy family who mysteriously disappeared 40 years prior.

Megan Abbott’s name may not be as widely known as that of Gillian Flynn, but she is equally as essential a writer for fans of suspense and thriller fiction, and You Will Know Me showcases the author at her best. Abbott’s novel follows Katie and Eric Knox, the intense stage parents of a 15-year-old gymnastics star, as news of a violent death disrupts the community of Olympic gymnastics hopefuls to which the Knoxes belong.