Seven top literary thrillers

J.S.Monroe is the pseudonym of the British author Jon Stock. Stock is the author of six spy novels. His standalone psychological thrillers, written under the pseudonym J.S. Monroe, include Find Me, Forget My Name, and the newly released The Last Thing She Remembers.

At CrimeReads Monroe tagged seven favorite literary thrillers, including:

Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan

Not, perhaps, Ian McEwan’s most well-known novel, but Sweet Tooth is one of my personal favorites. I’m a succor for metafiction and the self-referential elements of this book are delicious. Serena Frome, an MI5 operative in the early 1970s, is instructed by her bosses to persuade left-leaning novelists to stop bashing the West. She focuses her attention – and literary funds, distributed through a fake cultural organization—on Tom Haley, a Sussex university PhD student who has had some success writing short stories. If Haley sounds familiar, he’s meant to: the student is a thinly disguised young McEwan, who wrote short stories before turning to novels. As for the success of Frome’s mission, all is revealed—or not—in a mercurial final twist.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue