The Best Books of 2019: Thrillers!

After the virtually non-stop leaden earnestness of dealing with debut fiction, it’s a wonderful break to turn from the sublime to the ridiculous, and despite what reading snobs might say about romance novels, there is no more inherently ridiculous sub-genre than thrillers, in which all the women are spies, all the children sound like the septuagenarian authors’ fuzzy memories of Shirley Temple, and all the men are effectively bulletproof alcoholics. As with so many previous years, 2019 fielded dozens and dozens of thrillers, and these were the best:

10 No Exit by Taylor Adams (Morrow) - This gripping debut from Taylor Adams starts with a pure gold scenario: a young woman trapped by a blizzard at a highway rest stop sees a small girl locked in an animal cage in the back of a vehicle in the snowbound parking lot, and a very involving thriller spools out from there.

9 The Siberian Dilemma by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster) - The oldest master on the list this time around is Martin Cruz Smith, here writing a lean and ferocious thriller featuring his popular Gorky Park protagonist, Arkady Renko, who debuted back when many of the other authors on this list were in grade school.

8 Elevator Pitch by Linwood Barclay (Morrow) - If No Exit operated on perfectly simple gold premise, this is perhaps even more true for this book by Linwood Barclay, the irresistible opening chapters of which can be summarized by “killer elevators.” Barclay works in simmering politics and police work, but the elevators are the key - you won’t ride one again for weeks after reading this.

7 All Out War by Sean Parnell (Morrow) - I only discovered Sean Parnell’s Eric Steele thrillers with this second volume in the series, and it certainly hit the ground running, with its chisel-jawed bulletproof special op hero jetting all over the globe, all set against the backdrop of a ticking time bomb. I’ll never miss another installment. 

6 The Passengers by John Marrs (Berkley) - In No Exit we had a killer premise: you see something clearly illegal at a highway rest stop. In Elevator Pitch we had an even more simple killer premise: murderous elevators. In John Marrs’ The Passengers the killer premise is equally visceral: self-driving cars used as weapons. Again: pure gold.

5 Redemption Point by Candice Fox (Forge) - This latest Crimson Lake novel is a fantastic twisting of three initially separate plots: a vengeance-crazed father, his former police detective target, and a rookie inspector, all of it written with sharp prose and memorable atmosphere.

4 The Smiling Man by Joseph Knox (Crown) - Epically flawed Detective Aidan Watts returns in this genuinely involving novel and investigates a smiling dead body found in a creepy abandoned hotel in Manchester. Knox fills his book with all the usual exotic machinery of the thriller novel, but his portraits of damaged people are terrifically complex.

3 Freefall by Jessica Barry (Harper) - This debut thriller from Jessica Barry likewise has the full array of alarums and excursions, but at its heart is a story of mothers and daughters: a mother learns that her daughter’s plane went down in the Rockies, but she doesn’t believe her daughter is dead, and Barry’s entwined narratives following mother and daughter steadily build in tension.

2 Buried by Ellison Cooper (Minotaur) - The thread of killer “inciting incidents” running through the list this year in many ways culminates in this thriller by Ellison Cooper, in which an FBI agent falls into a sinkhole in Shenandoah National Park and finds … decades worth of skeletons. Cooper’s star, Senior Special Agent Sayer Altair, is an irresistible creation, here in her best adventure. 

1 Shark Beach by Chris Jameson (St. Martins) - A family vacationing in Florida. Rowdy college students. A secret military base experimenting on … sharks. Add a surprise hurricane, and 2019’s best thriller becomes something of a foregone conclusion.