The best office thrillers to keep you on the edge of your [desk] chair

The Firm is the seminal legal thriller. It launched not only Grisham’s long line of bestsellers but also an avalanche of wannabe lawyer-writers. But its lawyer-protagonist, Mitch McDeere, could as easily be an accountant or any other office worker whose dream job turns into a nightmare. Mitch is recruited out of law school to work for a firm where the perks seem too good to be true. Alas, they are. Turns out the firm is a front for the mob. The FBI comes calling, and Mitch faces a Hobson’s choice; spy on the bad guys and risk deadly retribution; or refuse to cooperate and go to prison. He chooses the high road and ends up on the run, chased by both the mob and the FBI, until he succeeds in outsmarting them all and sailing off into the sunset.

Grisham found a way to put crime-thriller terror into an office setting, as well as a way to turn a prosaic white-collar worker into a crime-stopping hero. This has served as a model for countless thrillers that followed.

Reading this novel is like mainlining adrenaline. David Elliott is at his desk in his executive suite office when his boss walks in and aims a gun at him. Over the next 24 hours, David is trapped in the 50-story office building while a team of highly skilled mercenaries hunts him down, and he has no idea why. Luckily he’s a Special Forces vet with mad ninja warrior skills, and he’s able to hold them at bay long enough to dig through company files and find out why he’s got a target on his back. Then comes the big reveal that explains why David has to die.

Vertical Run is absolutely cinematic. It’s as close to an action thriller as anyone could ever put on the page.

All Her Little Secrets brings the office thriller into the 21st century. Gone is the stereotypical white male protagonist. Ellice Littlejohn is a woman and an Ivy-educated Black lawyer with a harrowing back story full of poverty, abuse, and addiction. This novel doesn’t shy away from tackling institutionalized corporate racism, but make no mistake: it’s a thriller through and through. It’s wildly entertaining to follow Ellice in a climactic chase scene through office cubicles that are almost as adrenaline-spiked as Vertical Run.

This is a very modern take on the office thriller, because the office in question is a feminist take on work-share facilities like WeWork. It’s an exclusive, women-only coworking space launched by celebrity entrepreneur Eleanor Walsh. Millennial women are dying to be accepted—at least until Eleanor herself is found dead. This is a fun, glitzy book full of beautiful young women making their stilettoed way in the world. It’s Emily in Paris, set in New York, Sex and the City, for millennials, but with enough murder and mayhem to keep the thrills coming.

The setting makes this one a thrill as Ruth Ware proves that the office thriller doesn’t have to take place in a physical office. Equally deadly is an Alpine ski resort where a group of tech colleagues gather for a meeting/retreat to take a critical vote on a takeover bid. One by One is a closed-circle mystery and a deliberate homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None when an avalanche traps them into their lodge. It’s delicious fun to watch the author kill off one executive or employee after another until the killer is revealed in a sleight-of-hand almost as brilliantly devious as Christie’s.