16 Best Thriller Books That Give You Instant Goosebumps

Since you can't get your adrenaline out there, find it right here on the page.

We're still a few months away - at least - to get our thrills at amusement parks, sporting events, and escape rooms, but adrenaline junkies still have one place to turn: the bookshelf. For fans of blood-curdling stories of crime and suspense, nothing makes for a better escape from reality than a good thriller novel. Fortunately for such people, we kept track of the very best. Read on for a list of our top 16 thrillers from the 21st century and beyond.

1
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

There's a reason Gillian Flynn is a household name: she's the queen of the 21st-century suspense novel, her prose compulsively readable, her troubled heroines - and bad guys - cultural icons in their own right. Whichever of her books is your favorite, there's no denying that Gone Girl, the zeitgeist story of a missing woman and the man suspected of her disappearance, is a post-recession classic.

See Also: 20 Best Motivational Books of All Time to Inspire You

2
The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

If Gillian Flynn is the queen of modern suspense, Ruth Ware is the knight who presides over the round table. Often compared to a modern day Agatha Christie, Ware excels at thrillers set within the confines of small spaces, such as The Woman in Cabin 10, aboard a cruise ship where a travel journalist witnesses a murder. When she can't find evidence that the victim ever was on board, writer Lo begins to question her own sanity.

3
Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

We've covered this novel before because it's just that good: An urgent (and suddenly topical) investigation into racial tensions in Los Angeles, Steph Cha's latest article is a page turner about two families - a Black and a Korean - grappling with the legacy of a crime that shocked both their families in the months leading up to the 1992 LA riots.

4
Lucy Foley's Guest List

Relative newcomer Lucy Foley has her unique brand of reverse whodunit tension to a science - and thank goodness for that. As in The Hunting Party, Foley's 2018 escape, The Guest List - whichthrillerbegins at a classy wedding that went wrong on a remote Scottish island - with a murder and then plays a game of staying away with the victim's identity until the very last pages.

5
You, Volume 1 by Caroline Kepnes

We all owe Caroline Kepnes for writing the source material that gave us Penn Badgley's haunting performance as Joe Goldberg on the hit Netflix serial killer show You -but the original book is also not to be sneezed at. The first in a series (books 3 and 4 are on the way, according to Kepnes), this pitch-perfect thriller transcends genre convention by taking us into the mind of the killer himself.

6
the Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

God is a woman, but makes it "the original master of the psychological thriller". While 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 poignant suspense novels like Strangers on a Train (yes, as in the Hitchcock film) and Deep Water. Not to mention, she's the pen behind the fantastic Ripliad series, which follows in the footsteps of a brilliant - and dangerous - con artist.

7
Black Water Rising by Attica Lockevan Attica Locke

You know the work, whether you realize it or not: the author is also an accomplished screenwriter whose Empire, When They See Us and Little Fires Everywhere counts among her TV credits. But it's her acclaimed debut novel, set in 1980s Texas and following a lawyer crawling over his head after rescuing a woman from drowning, you should know that now.

8
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist, this isn't it. Released the same year as her breakthrough 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.

9
The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani

Do you remember the Nanny Diaries? This is as 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 begins with the unthinkable: a nanny murders the two children in her care and then tries to commit suicide. The story then jumps back in time several months, inviting readers to try to find out how - and why - this horrible thing happened.

10
They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall

Who doesn't love a good "strangers united by a gruesome secret" thriller? In one-time James Patterson collaborator Rachel Howzell Hall's heartbreaking self-contained novel, seven people are invited to travel to a remote private island, only to discover they've been summoned there under false pretenses - and their mysterious host has a deadly agenda.

11

Misery by Stephen King

When it comes to books that are thrilling and terrifying, Stephen King is the GOAT. Newcomers to his job could do worse than starting with Misery, which follows popular writer Paul Sheldon as he is rescued from a snowy car accident by super fan and former nurse Annie Wilkes - only to discover he's now in even greater danger is wrong.

12
The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Partly domestic thriller, part Kafka-esque allegory, Han Kang's Man Booker International Prize-winning three-part novel is about a woman who decides to become a vegetarian after awakening from a terrible, blood-soaked nightmare. Sounds harmless, right? It's not: the vegetarian is bold and unrelenting, following his protagonist through sexual assault, eating disorders and psychological torment.

13
The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong

Ah, the unreliable narrator - a protagonist of the suspense genre. When the 25-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to discover his mother's dead body at the bottom of the stairs of their austere apartment, he realizes he has no memory of the night before, other than the vague memory of his mother taking him. called. name. While desperate for the truth of what happened that night, Yu-jin discovers some family secrets that cannot be reburied.

14
Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara's These Bones Are Not My Child is not just a poignant thriller; it is a masterpiece of American literature. (Just ask Toni Morrison - she was Bambara's editor and longtime friend.) Posthumously published and set against the backdrop of the Atlanta infanticides of 1979-1981, Bambara's latest novel follows a mother whose worst nightmare is realized when her teenage son goes missing.

15
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Released in Swedish by Stieg Larsson in 2005 and in English in 2008, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo introduced the world to hacker-vigilante Lisbeth Salander - and became an almost instant literary phenomenon in the method. The first novel in 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 earlier.

16
You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott's name may not be as widely known as Gillian Flynn's, but she's just as essential a writer for fans of suspense and thriller fiction, and You Will Know Me leaves the author on her own. best to see. 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 Olympic gymnastics-hopeful community to which the Knoxes belong.