The 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time
Adead body is found at the bottom of the stairs. A child is kidnapped. A wife vanishes without a trace. What happened? Who did it? And, perhaps most importantly, why? These are the questions that guide mystery and thriller books—and it’s the process of uncovering the answers that makes the genre so engaging. These are the novels that invite readers to investigate alongside hard-boiled detectives, aspiring sleuths, and hapless husbands, among others. In this world, anyone can be a hero or a villain.
Which is why TIME set out to create a definitive list of the English language’s 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time. We began in early 2023 by recruiting leading authors to sit on our panel: Megan Abbott, Harlan Coben, S.A. Cosby, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Rachel Howzell Hall, and Sujata Massey. This group joined TIME staff in nominating the top books of the genre and rating more than 250 nominees on a scale. (Panelists did not put forward their own work.) Using the responses, TIME editors created a ranking, then evaluated each finalist, as well as additional titles, based on key factors including plot payoff, suspense, ambition, originality, critical and popular reception, and influence on the mystery and thriller genre and literature more broadly.
The resulting list features books that came out as long ago as 1860 and as recently as 2022, were originally published in 15 different countries, and are written by 100 distinct authors—no single writer’s work appears more than once. Taken together, the list celebrates books that offer a chance to escape, but also to interrogate the darkest parts of humanity—to become engrossed in these stories is to enter worlds both familiar and foreign, to put together the pieces of a perplexing plot, to think critically about what it means to be good and what it takes to be bad, and all that exists in the messy in-between.
In her introduction to the project, panelist and best-selling author Tana French reminds us of the genre’s impact, especially in increasingly turbulent times. “In a world that can often be chaotic and reasonless, we need these stories,” she writes. “We need to believe that sometimes things can fit together and make sense, even when that seems impossible; that someday our crisis will end and we’ll be able to leave it behind.”