A not-so complete list of the best thrillers I’ve read so far in an attempt to influence myself into developing greater lists in the future.

1. Night Film

Marisha Pessl
A mysterious woman is at the center of a dangerous collision between a reclusive film director who decided her fate and an investigative journalist on the edge of his career. The twists and turns are drawn all over the map of New York City’s streets and tunnels like a long exposure capturing the paths of old and new lights.

This novel has been in my top 3 favorite books of all time next to The Secret History (1) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2) for many years. It would take a wrecking ball to see it budge.

2. Out

Natsuo Kirino
A group of women all trapped in their own oppressive environments find one thing that unites them: a husband’s murder.

3. The Drowning Woman

Robyn Harding
The first, second, and third twists won’t prepare you for the shocking final moments of the main character’s story as she tries desperately to escape her own life, not knowing the whole time someone is also wishing to steal it.

4. The Alienist

Caleb Carr
Throwing itself into the chaos of 19-century New York, this story mixes the thrill of police procedurals with the grit of an expanding city in the midst of volitile change.

5. The Butterfly House

Katrine Engberg
Engberg’s Danish mysteries carry you throw multiple storylines, all reaching a point as sharp as a blade that at the end cuts through every page and takes you back to the firsts chapter’s reveal.

6. Hidden in Shadows

Viveca Sten
The least likely character is revealed as our murderer by a detective duo as they struggle between seeing the worst in themselves while missing the same in others. I would dare to say Viveca Sten is Sweden’s Tana French. I am perpetually pre-ordering her next novels.

7. The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you’ve ever found yourself obsessively lost between the chapters, pages, and words of a novel, you’ll find a commonality with this book’s main character. A cursed book from a library held secret within his family leads to him inheriting the same curious questions about the book’s author as his father before meeting his fate.

8. The Quiet Tenant

Clémence Michallon
The lines of safety and danger and truth and secret are blurred when a woman held captive in a crude shed is brought into the family home if her capter.

9. Final Girls

Riley Sager
The main character’s secret relationship to a massacre manages to break through all of her attempts to suppress it with the help of another final girl’s manipulations. But memories hidden for so long begin to come back distorted and unreliable, causing her to second guess her own methods of surviving.

10. The Current

Tim Johnston
Every chapter breaks the ice deeper and deeper in this cold case thriller that relies on memories distorted by fear, suspicion, and trauma.