One of the most self-indulgent of the fiction sub-genres (right alongside romance novels), thrillers have had a rough road to travel in the COVID era, since readers’ nerves are fairly permanently on edge — seemingly the last state of mind that would ever be conducive to reading books designed to work your last good nerve. And yet, there’s an undeniable catharsis in reading a sub-genre that’s even more pointedly full of woe and pain and anxiety than the nightly news. Thriller-writers have kept churning out their books plague or no plague, and many of them were very good. These were the best:

10 The Dying Day by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton) - This second book in Vassem Khan’s “Malabar House” series could just as easily have headed up the Best Mystery list, since it features heroic sleuth Pesis Wadia in post-Partition Bombay investigating a case involving an ancient copy of The Divine Comedy that’s gone missing. 

9 Relentless by Jonathan Maberry (Rogue Team International #2) (St. Martin’s Griffin) - Jonathan Maberry’s signature character, Joe Ledger, here teamed up with Rogue Team International, has been pretty badly traumatized in recent Maberry novels, and in this latest thriller, involving cyber soldiers and black market weapons, Ledger is therefore by far the most dangerous element.

8 Basil’s War by Stephen Hunter (Mysterious Press) - Stephen Hunter has created a crackerjack character in louche, lethal WWII-era British Army agent Basil St. Florian, here hunting for a missing manuscript in German-occupied France, and he’s filled this thriller with plenty of badinage and walk-ons by historical figures.

7 Relentless by Mark Greaney (Berkley) - It would hardly be a year-end Thriller list without a Gray Man novel by Mark Greaney, would it? (Or more than one book called “Relentless”) The Gray Man is Court Gentry, the standard thriller-novel omni-capable super-agent, here sent to Venezuela to retrieve an intelligence agent who might have answers to the disappearance of other agents throughout the world. All the great Gray Man novel qualities are here in abundance.

6 Sea Hawke by Ted Bell (Berkley) - Like all the other super-agents on this list, Ted Bell’s Alex Hawke occasionally needs a break from all the jet-setting and derring-do. He won’t get one, of course - as this new novel opens, he’s on vacation after his last super-adventure when thriller-style danger comes looking for him, and then readers are off to all corners of the world.

5 Ascension by Oliver Harris (Houghton Mifflin) - This Oliver Harris novel has a baker’s dozen of the most cherished hallmarks of the thriller genre: the hero, Elliot Kane, is once again omni-capable, and in this story he’s called out of retirement for a special mission, the mission takes him to a far-off locale, Ascension Island, and so on. And Harris writes it all with breakneck pace and conviction. 

4 13 Days to Die by Matt Miksa (Crooked Lane Books) - Unusual for a debut novel to make this list, but this novel, by former FBI intelligence agent Matt Miksa, easily earns the spot: it’s sharply, absorbingly written narrative about American intelligence officer Olen Grave, who’s in Tibet hunting down the origins of a deadly super-plague, and it’s one of the most assured debuts I read this year in any genre.

3 The Nameless Ones by John Connolly (Atria) - As with the Gray Man, so too with Charlie Parker: a year’s-best thriller list would hardly seem complete without the character’s latest adventure. Here Connolly’s inimitable former police officer Charlie Parker gets tangled up in a deadly contest between a mysterious killer and a group of Serbian war criminals, and it’s classic Charlie Parker right from the first page.

2 Damascus Station by David McCloskey (WW Norton) - Another debut makes the list with this seriously impressive spy thriller about a CIA case officer who falls in love with a Syrian Palace official as they team up to investigate the disappearance of an American agent. David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst, and he brings both his professional experience and a good deal of narrative energy to his first book.

1 City on Fire by Don Winslow (William Morrow) - We end our list this year the way we began it, with a fantastic book that could easily stand on a different list, in this case Best Fiction: Don Winslow’s latest fierce, epic crime novel, the best thriller of the year, centers on a man who sets about building a criminal empire in Providence and absolutely crackles with Winslow’s intelligence and dark wit.