9 Nail-Biting Thrillers About Revenge

Àbíké-Íyímídé’s twisty thriller, set at a boarding school, is a tale of revenge against a secretive group who run the academy behind the scenes and use their clandestine power to harm people without accountability. The main characters band together to take the group down, but each member of the team investigating the sinister goings-on at the school has their own motive as well — and many are seeking revenge for crimes that have been committed against them or the people they love.

Told from multiple perspectives, this tense story follows Cole, a man who has recently separated from his wife, and Lennie, an artist who has moved to the seaside to find inspiration for her work. Both get caught up in a local disappearance of two young women who are walking the coastline go missing. As with all good thrillers, there’s more going on with every character than the reader initially suspects, and the story explores how far people will go for revenge — or justice.

The “Queen of the Big Reveal”, Koomson, brings her A-game in this fast-paced read. Kez is a therapist and forensic profiler whose life is turned upside down when a baby is abandoned in her car — a baby that she believes belongs to a young woman she has mentored and cared for. As Kez tries to trace her young friend and find out why she left her child, she discovers a conspiracy based around hatred and vengeance.

If you like Agatha Christie stories, this locked-door thriller set in an old stately home that’s been cut off by a snowstorm will be right up your street. Three girls find themselves stuck in a manor house, owned by a strange, aristocratic family, and the evening ends in murder — but what initially seems to be a random set of circumstances turns out to be an intricate revenge plot.

Dr. Miriam Price is dead, but only she knows that she has been murdered — although even she doesn’t remember who committed the crime. She has a short period of time in the afterlife to prove that her death wasn’t a misadventure so that she can move on to the next phase. With the help of her crotchety neighbour, Miriam has to investigate her own murder and soon discovers that she made more enemies in her life than even she anticipated — and that one of them was out for revenge.

Care worker Rita Marsh seems like a perfectly ordinary person, but she’s secretly a vigilante, catfishing predatory men online. Rita manages to keep both sides of herself totally separate, until someone from her past comes back, and her secret threatens to come out. This twisty tale treads the line between fighting evil and taking revenge — and it isn’t clear which path Nina Marsh will take.

The Hive is an intense revenge thriller that looks at the dark side of social media and asks the reader how far they would go for their friends — and what they would be willing to tolerate to punish someone for what they’ve done in the past. A young woman, Charlotte, goes live on Instagram to tell the world that she has already killed one person, and is ready to kill another — if, after hearing the man’s crimes, her viewers vote that he should die.

This contemporary fantasy thriller follows Jessamyn Teoh, a young woman who moves back to her home country of Malaysia. Jessamyn begins hearing voices and realises that she has the ability to listen to the dead. One of these restless spirits is her grandmother, Ah Ma, who has a connection with a god known as the Black Water Sister. Ah Ma tells Jessamyn that a local gang boss has caused trouble for the Black Water Sister and that both their fates depend on helping the god take revenge.

This is the third in Harris’s series of books set in the fictional town of Malbry, specifically at the elite private school St Oswald’s. Different Class focuses on the lingering impact of a long-ago crime. The school’s new headmaster, Johnny Harrington, attended the school as a student three decades earlier, and elderly teacher Roy Straitley remembers the events that occurred back then — and worries that Harrington has returned with revenge in mind.