The most recommended FBI books

Picture Jack Reacher on an NYC subway car at 2 AM with a suicide bomber. Will she blow up the car and everyone in it? I love how Lee Child keeps us in suspense, not just for a page or two, for twenty-seven pages! Reacher finds out the woman had a dangerous secret, but everyone he talks to lies to him. Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger and more questions. 

But many people want Reacher to stop asking questions: a former Delta Force operative running for the US Senate, two Al Qaeda agents, NYC cops, and FBI agents. They want Reacher to get lost and forget the suicide bomber. Fat chance! The complex plot will intrigue you. The climactic ending will terrify you even more than the suicide bomber.

Definitely a page-turner. A dark mystery/thriller/romance that is fed to you through FBI profiler Lilah Love's eyes. FBI agent Lilah Love leads a complicated life. She's engaged to Kane Mendez, a man most call dangerous, but hey birds of a feather, do flock together. She's dangerous, too, and in ways only Kane understands. As for their happily ever after, well that might have to wait. Right now, an old enemy who should be dead is still living, Junior, her mystery letter writer, is stirring up trouble, and her family is trying to prove they're crazier than her. On top of that, she has a new case: a dead woman in a bloody wedding dress. And since Lilah knows all too well there is no such thing as coincidence, clearly, someone is sending her yet another message. If you love romantic suspense novels, secrets, and scandals with a bit of profiling… show more.

Part of me identified with the profession of Lily, the main female protagonist of this novel being an FBI agent. I admire how the author took the “fated lovers” with 100% none of the cliché tropes that usually go with this type of storyline. I loved that Lily had real problems outside of her work and has to solve cases in addition to juggling a wedding and everything else going on in her world. Ms. Wilks constructed a very real world and gave the supporting characters their own storylines and arcs which is extremely hard to do while staying true to the overall plot.

This story about three restless college students at a liberal arts enclave in the southwestern desert who become embroiled in a protest to stop a pipeline reminded me of my days as a malcontent at the University of Colorado Boulder. When the FBI comes to town in pursuit of an alum wanted for “politically motivated crimes of property,” rumor has it that undercover agents are enrolled in classes, making the college dating scene that much stranger. The characters variously discover a passion for activism, the seduction of the unknown, and their own voices. This book is fun, interesting, and evocative. 

This Times bestseller is a page-turner of true crime that combines our fascination with spy games and a real-world FBI detective story, an epic stretching from the 1920s to a "floodtide of espionage" in the late 1930s and the counterintelligence war through a foiled sabotage mission to blow up U.S. bridges and waterworks (which the FBI's Hoover nearly botched then spun for favorable publicity) to V-E day.

This story is filled with quirky characters, a beautiful backdrop, suspense, and sweet romance, perfect for a romantic comedy. Escaping an abusive fiancé, Laurel McDowell flees with her feisty feline Rufus and her few belongings to her family home in California’s Big Sur. Trouble quickly follows. Soon, she is embroiled in a money laundering conspiracy and finds herself in the cross-hairs of the Russian Mafia. Luckily, FBI forensic accountant Jake Carlson is on the case. This author has a gift for humor, and I found myself chuckling as I read. The supporting characters—Laurel’s restaurateur mother, her two artist sisters, and a high school friend—are likable to the point I wish I could take a cross-country drive to visit. 

When an FBI agent came to Kerri Rawson's house to talk about the BTK killer, she made him show her his badge because her father Dennis Rader had always warned her to do that to be safe. 

When the agent mentioned the BTK killer, Rawson blurted out, "Has something happened to my Grandma? Has my Grandma been murdered?"

She never imagined he was there to tell her that her Dad, a church president and scout leader, was the BTK killer. 

She writes with humor about how her childhood home was sold at a public auction and her life was temporarily derailed due to her father's actions. With her faith and her family's love, she learned to live with it. 

Her humor is evident from the first page to the last. The first chapter title is "Whatever Doesn't Kill You..." At the end there's a handy list of "Eight Things Not… show more.

I got soooo hooked on Julie’s contemporary suspense books. In Heartbreaker, as the story opens, we learn our hero agent Nick Buchanan has just saved a young boy’s life by taking out a serial killer who held him captive. Nick then gets to take some time off for a vacation, and as he’s on the plane waiting to depart, he stops an armed man from trying to free a prisoner another lawman has on the plane. He is definitely the white knight showing up at just the right time. When he meets up with his best friend, he learns a serial killer is after his friend’s sister. I couldn’t wait to see how he was going to protect the heroine, Laurant, from the psychopath and bring him in. This is my kind of hero—courageous, up for anything, never afraid to put his life in danger to right a wrong.

I’m usually one for a light and easy romance, but The Art of Murder really had me second-guessing my preferences!

Fast-paced, heart-stopping, and fabulous, Claire Ripley gives you everything you want in a romantic suspense novel. The author knows how to artfully weave together external conflict with a roller coaster of emotions. The characters are well-written, and the plot really kept me turning pages.

This is a quick, fun read that’ll leave you guessing and cheering for a (spoiler alert!) happily-ever-after. 

Donnie Brasco follows FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone’s six-year infiltration into the Mafia.

Posing as a street-level jewel thief, Pistone provides a bottoms-up look into the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bonanno’s in Brooklyn, from the family’s epicenter in pre-gentrified Williamsburg and Greenpoint. This rank-and-file rundown shines a harsh light on the petty lives of street soldiers and their conniving capos in their natural habitat, from scrounging for scraps in wood-paneled clubhouses to lording over their turf from pigeon-cooped rooftops.

In fact, the juxtaposition of setting, in flipping between sinister South Brooklyn and sizzling South Florida, is a masterful use of setting to set the tone. As Pistone goes native, becoming more and more Bonanno, we wonder what he sees in The Life led in these cramped apartments, velour-draped dives, and dingy clubhouses.

Locations of interest: The Motion Lounge nightclub on Graham Avenue in Williamsburg; Brooklyn Armory in Park Slope; The… show more.

A romantic suspense with an unlikely hero with a dark, murderous past and a female FBI agent with a history that haunts her.

It is packed with action and an ending that will shock you. It’s a story of redemption, self-forgiveness, and righting wrongs. A real page-turner.

Alex Parker has become one of my all-time favorite characters. A former CIA agent and now a computer wizard is forced to kill those that escape justice to settle a debt. 

Cutting Edge was my first book by Allison Brennan. The story started strong and captured me from the beginning into what turned out to be a fantastic plot.

I loved how the author gave us insight into the villain’s mind yet still managed to insert plenty of unexpected twists. I liked and identified with the heroine, Nora English, from the first paragraphs. The supporting characters were just as well constructed. This book had a little bit of everything, including a love story, which was a plus because I like romance in all books; it makes them real to me. 

Stepping away from the topic of immersive technology, The Ransomware Hunting Team instead looks at the realities of cybercrime in the US, and why especially our government infrastructure has such a hard time fighting it effectively. 

Like all the other books on my list, it’s an examination of what happens when the rubber meets the road with a new technology, and how we humans often just aren’t very good at adapting to change.  

Part of the key problem is that hackers – including the white hat hackers that you want on your side to bring down the bad guys – tend not to be social animals, and our official organizations are far happier hiring a smiling guy in a suit than a scowling nerd who would rather work from his dark bedroom at home.  (Apologies for the stereotypes, but – this really is a problem!) 

This book is an absorbing… show more.

While I love the old classics, I’ve discovered several contemporary authors whose cozy mysteries draw me in. I read this prequel after having devoured several books about Raleigh Harmon as an adult working for the FBI and then as a private investigator. They’re all great, but the three in the Prequel series (or Young Raleigh Harmon series) are now my favorites. I love the teenage Raleigh, who must solve serious mysteries while dealing with her difficult family. I love her genius best friend, Drew. And I love the way Raleigh uses her passion for geology and her common sense in every mystery.

I love a good page-turner. I love to write them and I love to read them. I strive to write novels that the reader will binge. Novels as addictive as a drug. I want each chapter I write to be like another hit—a re-up that floods the reader’s brain with dopamine. Tell No One by Harlan Coben is a novel that I binged. It keeps you guessing until the end. And while some of the payoffs may seem a little over-the-top, I am able to overlook it because this novel (like much of Coben’s work) is just so damn addictive!

Because it was not only a thick* book, but it proved that you can think a book is crap one day, and absolutely love it the next**. 

I was going to have an impacted wisdom tool chiseled out and wanted a book for my convalescence. It had a great cover, so I flipped open to the first page and read the opening line—something like, “Amoebas don’t have bones…”.

I bought it and had the wisdom tooth removed, which evidently actually removed the wisdom needed to appreciate the writing.

Time passed, and I gave the book another try—evidently the wisdom had returned because what had once been chaotic and confusing and stupid, was now delightfully random and effortlessly insightful, and really really fun. I loved this book.

* At least it seemed thick to me at that age.

** Actually, it wasn’t the next day, it was actually about a year… show more.

This account of a real-life American horror story is nonfiction but reads like a thriller.

When the Osage tribe was moved to land in Oklahoma that turned out to be sitting on oil fields, white criminals resolved to do anything—including murder—to get that oil money from the Osage.

I’d never heard about any of this before reading the book, and it’s a devastating story full of greed, betrayal, racism, and death. I have yet to see the film based on the book, but it’s hard to imagine a movie being any more horrifying than the actual story.

Great follow-up novel in Sanford’s Prey Series concerning a serial female killer. Sanford leaves the reader from a previous prey novel, where the female serial killer escapes.  This leaves his readers with a desire to learn more….a continuing storyline…and he more than satisfies that with her return in Mortal Prey.

A famous hacker’s real-life story, told from his own perspective, Ghost in the Wires explains how criminal hackers think and act and the diverse techniques they use, no keyboard necessary—all, in this case, with little motive beyond a compulsion to explore and exploit. The hacking community has no bigger characters than Kevin Mitnick and no better first-person accounts of the art of “social engineering,” or human hacking—manipulating people (including, in Mitnick’s case, the FBI and other would-be pursuers) to your own advantage.

I devoured all of Grisham’s books as they came out. The legal thrillers make studying the law extremely fascinating. The Pelican Brief is still one of my favorites because of my own love of New Orleans, the environment, and how I saw myself as a passionate environmentalist at one time. The Pelican Brief shows us how intertwined law, land use, the environment, and murder can be. We see how a young woman with a curious mind can see patterns that others have not and the lengths she has to go to to find justice.