As with all the sub-genres of fiction, so too with thrillers: some years will be better than others. Occasionally, there aren't even enough to make up a “best of” list, but this year there were plenty of books providing the peculiar entirely illicit joys of thriller-reading: the outlandish action sequences, the ridiculous plot contrivances, the canned dialogue, the empty calories of reading time. In the whole span of escapist fiction, thrillers are among the most purely enjoyable. In 2023, these were the best of them:

10 Exiles by Jane Harper (Flatiron Books)

Harper returns to the evocative Australian settings that have always made her books stand out, this time to flesh out a nail-biting missing persons case in which a distraught daughter pleads with the public for any information about the disappearance of her mother. When the investigation gets increasingly murky, Harper very effectively turns the screws on the everybody's-a-suspect tension.

9 Code 6 by James Grippando (Harper)

The “Code 6” in the title of Grippando's latest is the super-secret technological innovation of the ominous Buck Technologies, which is being demanded by the kidnappers of one of the company's most powerful executives. Complicating the picture is the fact that our heroine, the daughter of Buck's CEO, is working on an incendiary script about Big Data. Grippando works all this outlandish stuff into a delightful froth.

8 Burner by Mark Greaney (Berkley)

Greaney's “Gray Man” series of adventure-thrillers starring action hero Court Gentry always, always delivers exactly the kind of quip-heavy action-oriented non-stop pacing that's the sweetest kind of thriller, and this latest Gentry adventure is not exception, with Gentry and his sultry former girlfriend hunting for a hapless bank employee who's accidentally stumbled on some sensitive information that has virtually everybody in the world wanting him dead.

7 Going Zero by Anthony McCarten (Harper)

Just as with “Code 6,” so too with this latest from McCarten: Big Tech takes center stage, in this case surveillance tech, which has reached gigantically dystopian proportions in our real world and so is naturally a candidate for fiction. In this novel, a tech company offers a huge reward to whichever member of a test group can evade its surveillance tech – but one of the group has motives or her own for staying invisible.

6 Red River Seven by AJ Ryan (Orbit)

Another element you always hope for in a thriller – a slam-bang gimmicky premise – is front and center in this addictive novel from Ryan, in which a bunch of people awaken to find themselves floating at sea. None of them remembers who they are or why they're at sea, and tensions immediately start growing.

5 All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham (Minotaur Books)

Willingham's bleak and totally involving novel revolves around a mother who literally hasn't slept in the year since her little boy was kidnapped from her house. She's become monomaniacally obsessed with finding her son, to the reality-warping exclusion of all else – which neatly turns the reader's sympathy for her into an edgy kind of wariness that's very effectively goosed throughout the book.

4 You Will Never Be Found by Tove Alsterdal (Harper)

Looking past the idiotic titling-trend (“You Will Never Be Found,” “No One Can Save You,” “I Will Kill You,” “I”m an Excellent Driver,” etc.), readers here are re-introduced to Swedish Detective Eira Sjodin and brought to a barren tiny mining town inside the Arctic Circle, where the community is literally being swallowed by “The Hole.” In the midst of all this well-described upheaval, Sjodin naturally finds murder, and the thing takes off.

3 Sleepless City by Reed Farrell Coleman (Blackstone)

This is the first book in a projected series starring Nick Ryan, who's almost a parody of the typical thriller-hero: he's a super-cop who's feared by good guys and bad guys alike, a McBain-type character who plays by his own rules and is fairly ridiculous until the book's plot contrives to make him a desperate underdog, at which point he becomes more interesting than irritating.

2 Forgotten War by Don Bentley (Berkley)

Bentley's entry on this thriller list is grittier and more nearly topical than most of the others, revolving around the battle-tested brotherhood bond forged between two American soldiers in Afghanistan. When one of them is accused of a horrible crime, the other has to dig into their darkest shared experiences in an attempt to exonerate him.

1 Sea Castle by Andrew Mayne (Thomas & Mercer)

This best thriller of 2023, the fourth installment in Mayne's “Underwater Investigations Unit” series, takes some narrative chances the earlier volumes avoided, including sharing the focus between Mayne's standout heroine, dive investigator Sloan McPherson, and a far less appealing guest character – and these gambles ultimately pay off, making Sea Castle the most unusual entry in the series but also the most fascinating.