The Best Thriller Books That’ll Have You Gripped From The First Page

If you’ve been in a reading slump lately – and honestly, who hasn’t, this is 2026 – sometimes all you need is a good, page-turner-y thriller to get the blood pumping again. To my mind, the best thriller books are the ones that are astute and well-written, yet still feel twisty and gripping. And there also needs to be tension – lots of it. “A great thriller, to me, is more about creating a sense of unease,” the great Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame once said. “A queasiness that comes with knowing something is not quite right.” With that in mind, what are some of the best thriller books out there? Read on for British Vogue’s top picks.

The Girls by Emma Cline

Ever wondered what it would have been like to have been a Manson girl? The Girls by Emma Cline isn’t about the Manson Family per se – though it is from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, Evie, looking back on her time in the ’60s after becoming entangled in a soon-to-be-infamous Californian cult led by a dangerous yet charismatic leader, so there are more than a few parallels. More than that, though, The Girls is an empathetic yet knotty – and also chilling – story of teenage girlhood, obsession and how one can become tangled up in something that they’ll only truly understand the impact of years later.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Ah, Gone Girl – everyone’s favourite film starring Rosamund Pike as missing woman Amy Dunne and Ben Affleck as her perennially forlorn and also quite useless husband, Nick. Gillian Flynn’s original book is just as good – if not better – than the film. Especially if you somehow, after more than a decade, don’t know anything about the big final twist. It also gave us the “cool girl monologue” – as in, the legendary diary entry from Amy that did the rounds on Tumblr for years afterwards and which still, I think, reverberates through pop culture today.

The Fever by Megan Abbott

Every single one of Megan Abbott’s books is worth reading (and you’re in luck, she’s published 12 of them). But The Fever –  about a fictional small-town high school gripped by a mysterious and rapidly spreading illness – is one of her strongest. As in her earlier novel Dare Me, Abbott places teenage girls and their inner worlds front and centre, exploring obsession, desire, angst and interpersonal drama. If the plot lines sound familiar, The Fever was inspired by the real-life 2012 mass hysteria case in Le Roy, New York, in which nearly 20 students suddenly developed involuntary physical and verbal tics.

Dodgers by Bill Beverly

I became quite obsessed with this coming-of-age thriller from Bill Beverly this past summer, which I read in two sittings. The American crime writer and liberal arts teacher only wrote one novel, the award-winning Dodgers, and hasn’t written another since. It’s beautifully written – poetic, sometimes almost abstract, but never overly flowery – and stands apart from other books of a similar genre. Premise-wise, the book follows 15-year-old LA gang member, East, who is sent on a 2,000-mile journey to Wisconsin to track down and murder a key witness set to testify against his organisation. A road-trip thriller at its most compelling and unconventional.

The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

Maybe you’ve seen the 2016 movie starring Emily Blunt or maybe you haven’t, but this classic psychological thriller from British author Paula Hawkins is well worth a read. Here’s the premise: after losing both her job and her marriage, Rachel Watson, a struggling alcoholic, aimlessly rides the train into New York every day. The train regularly pauses at a signal overlooking the back garden of a house in her old neighbourhood, where she obsessively watches a couple, Megan and Scott. But then, Megan goes missing. And Rachel becomes embroiled in the police investigation. I won’t spoil the rest, but there’s a reason it spent 13 consecutive weeks at the top of the New York Times best sellers list.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Another Gillian Flynn? Yes, why not. Her debut novel Sharp Objects, released in 2006, is just as gripping as Gone Girl. The book follows Camille Preaker, a troubled newspaper journalist who returns to her hometown in Missouri to report on a series of murders. While there, she reconnects with her estranged mother and teenage half sister, staying in their Victorian mansion while she delves into the crimes. The book ends up being about so much more than the murders, however, with twists and revelations that’ll leave you chilled to the bone. And don’t miss HBO’s criminally underrated mini-series adaptation, starring Amy Adams, either.

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Belinda Bauer’s Snap opens in the late ’90s, from the perspective of three children who have been left in a broken down car at the side of the M5. Their pregnant mother has gone to find help, except she never returns. What follows is a taut and twisty thriller – one which deftly explores themes of trauma, revenge and family relationships. This is a crime novel on the face of it, except it falls into none of the tropes of the genre. So much so that, in 2018, it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize – almost unheard of for a prize which usually snubs genre fiction. An excellent read which I wish I could scrub from memory and read again!