The 15 Best Andrew Klavan Books

At a weekend Christmas Party young reporter Mike North tries to impress an attractive female student, Susannah, by making up a ghost story featuring a lurking killer with a scarred face. Instead of being amused, Susannah is horrified and leaves early the next morning.

Eager to apologize and get some time alone with the young woman, Mike travels to her college town.

When he arrives, he is alarmed to see a man creeping around near Susannah’s dorm—a man with a heavily scarred face.

What seems like it’s going to be just another boring day in her New York office for Nancy Kincaid, quickly turns weird when her colleagues claim not to know who she is.

At first, Nancy thinks it must just be part of a standard workplace prank, but then, as night begins to fall, things take an even more sinister twist.

This stylishly written and haunting psychological thriller with echoes of Hitchcock was written when Klavan was living in England.

A tormented artist, Agnes Mallory writes tortured letters to her wise-cracking friend Harry who does his best to help her.

After Agnes’ death another young woman with a dark history enters Harry’s life and the horrors of past and present begin to tighten around him.

A taut as piano-wire psychological thriller co-authored with brother Laurence. A knife-wielding killer brings bloody violence to a quiet Connecticut suburb.

Only one person is truly in a position to unmask the serial killer, the woman who knows him best—his wife.

The first in a four book series featuring crusty old crime reporter, John Wells sees the New York Star’s tech-averse newshound sent to cover a teen suicide in Grant County.

The police are presenting it as an open-and-shut case, but Wells is soon convinced the kid’s fatal wounds could not have been self-inflicted.

Lonely jazz musician Lonnie Blake pursues a woman with whom he had a one-night stand in New York. He’s not the only one who’s looking for her, though.

However, as the search becomes more desperate, it becomes apparent to Lonnie that it’s not the woman these sinister individuals are after, it’s her daughter—a three-year-old with an extraordinary gift.

Second in the John Wells series sees the tough but moral reporter back on the New York crime beat. This time he’s investigating the murder of his colleague, war correspondent Tim Colt.

It looks like a random killing, but is there something more to it than that, and why has the love of Colt’s life, a female missionary also disappeared?

Veteran reporter John Wells is offered a cache of compromising photos of a US congressman. He turns them down, unwilling to involve himself in tabloid sleaze.

But when the stranger winds up murdered, his bosses want to know why he let the story go and Wells sets about trying to find the photos and the woman who’s in them.

A hard-boiled classic.

John Wells is sent to cover the story of an upper-class college student, Thad Reich who’s been found dead with a broken windpipe in a Manhattan apartment.

There’s only one problem: Wells already knows that the killer acted in self-defense, because he was the killer.

A terrific conclusion to an outstanding series that calls to mind Kenneth Fearing’s noir classic The Big Clock.

A surprise phone call from a figure out of his past, plunges respectable pillar of his stable Midwest community Jason Harrow back into a world of corruption, violence, and lies.

In New York, Harrow must search for the missing daughter of a woman he once loved, while hunted by both police and international terrorists.

Middle-aged PI Scott Weiss has a romantic heart, so when he falls for a woman with a mysterious past he can’t help wondering if they might make a life together.

When she leaves, he follows. Unfortunately for Weiss, there’s another man on her trail, too.

Even worse, he happens to be a psychotic professional killer.

Hunted by police for a murder he didn’t commit, petty criminal John Shannon gets a new identity courtesy of a mysterious stranger known only as The Identity Man.

Hiding out in a southern city that’s been destroyed by a hurricane, Shannon soon discovers that, in the world of crime, no good deed comes without strings attached.

After breaking a sex trafficking case and almost losing his mind, detective Dan Champion is slowly rebuilding his life as a small town cop.

Then a body is found, a murder victim who looks very like a woman from a past he thought he’d left far behind.

Nathan Conrad is a successful psychiatrist, but not quite successful enough to afford all the things he wants. Enter a new patient from the criminal underworld who can help Nathan step up the financial ladder, but at what cost?

This brilliant thriller was memorably filmed with Michael Douglas.

Psychiatrist Cal Bradley runs a small respectable clinic in New England and lives an ideal family life.

But when a young patient runs off and shortly afterward a stranger is murdered, he turns detective determined to clear his patient’s name and find the real killer.

His investigation will turn his contented, steady world upside down.