The Best Thrillers of All Time (page 2 of 2)

5 More Captivating Thriller Genres

6. The Medical Thriller
Medical paperwork these days is pretty terrifying, but you can get true terror in these two great medical thrillers. Read Coma by Robin Cook (1977), the unforgettable saga of patients who check into the hospital for "minor" surgery and never wake up. For the strong of stomach, The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen (2001) is gruesomely chilling and addictively page-turning.

7. The Sci-Fi Thriller
Sure he's done dinosaurs and television emergency rooms, but Michael Crichton's first novel, The Andromeda Strain (1969), still ranks as one of the top science fiction thrillers of all time. What could be scarier than microscopic killer germs run amok? Representing the larger end of the weird-creature spectrum, Mammoth by John Varley (2005) imaginatively spins a yarn starring a billionaire, a brilliant nerd, and a gifted animal wrangler whose newest charge happens to be a woolly mammoth.

8. The Military Thriller
You've seen the movie, but don't miss the book. The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill (1950) is even more captivating on paper, with perhaps the most hair-raising POW escape scene ever written. Remembering that this novel is based on a true story renders it doubly nerve-racking. For contemporary military thrillers, nothing beats the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. Try the first Reacher novel, Killing Floor (1997) or Child's latest bestseller, One Shot (2005). Or, for that matter, pick up any riveting Reacher book in between.

9. The True-Crime Thriller
Yes, real life can be stranger than fiction, and true-crime thrillers prove this. The most famous book in this nonfiction genre is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966). The author spent months in the Midwest painstakingly retracing the steps of two young rural killers -- and then wrote about it chillingly. Another excellent and more recent true-crime book is Green River, Running Red by Ann Rule (2004), the true story of the notorious Green River serial killer who terrorized the Seattle area for decades.

10. The Action/Adventure Thriller
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read (1974) set the gold standard for heroic survival stories, with this true tale of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashes, resulting in an incredible 10-week physical and emotional ordeal. Changing altitudes from mountains to the ocean floor, Shadow Divers, the hit 2005 book by Robert Kurson, re-enacts the story of an extraordinary deep-sea discovery and adventure.

You can see why thrillers have always been one of the most popular modern reading genres, with dozens of them dominating the bestseller lists each year. "Thrillers stand alone for their sheer page-turning quotient," says editor Kelly. "Once you've been in the grip of a good thriller you can't wait for your next thriller fix."

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