Four armed men seize a New York City subway train, taking seventeen passengers hostage and demanding a fortune within an hour. As the city negotiates, a transit police lieutenant races to understand the hijackers' escape plan before the deadline runs out.
After Kristallnacht, a Jewish businessman escapes his Berlin apartment and begins moving from train to train across Germany. Unable to leave the country, he tries to hide his identity while the network of trains becomes both shelter and trap.
Between 1941 and 1943 the German and French police arrested hundreds of women who had worked for the Resistance. Drawn from interviews and archives, this book follows 230 of them from prison in France onto the trains to Auschwitz, and the friendships that sustained them.
A man is pulled from the Mediterranean with bullet wounds and no memory. Clues point to a life as a professional assassin, and both the CIA and a killer called Carlos are hunting him. To survive, he must reconstruct who he was before he is caught.
In 1855 a polished thief plans to steal a shipment of gold being carried by train from London toward the Crimea. He gathers a crew, copies the four keys to the safes and studies the timetable, while a police informant threatens to expose the scheme.
On a train through continental Europe, a young Englishwoman befriends an older governess. After a nap she finds the woman gone, and every other passenger denies she ever existed. Alone and doubting her own mind, Iris searches the carriages for proof.
A snowdrift halts the Orient Express, and by morning an American passenger is found stabbed in his locked compartment. With the train stranded, Hercule Poirot questions thirteen passengers whose accounts do not add up, and uncovers the threads of an old crime.
Vlad Taltos is an assassin who has risen to run a piece of the Jhereg, the empire's crime syndicate. Hired to kill Mellar, a Jhereg boss who has embezzled a fortune, Vlad finds him sheltering as the guest of the Dragonlord Morrolan, whose code of hospitality forbids any harm to come to him—and the Jhereg insist the hit be done before Mellar leaves.
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears from a rented house and her husband Nick becomes the prime suspect. Two narrators tell very different versions of the same marriage.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London to travel through Asia by train. He crosses Europe, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia, and returns on the Trans-Siberian Railway, recording the trains, stations and people he meets.
A Finnish student leaves Moscow by train for Mongolia, hoping to study ancient rock carvings and escape a failed affair. She shares compartment six with a loud, hard-drinking former soldier, and the long ride across Russia becomes an uneasy companionship.
Dominika Egorova, a Russian intelligence officer trained to seduce targets, is ordered to work against a CIA agent, Nathaniel Nash. As their operations and their feelings become entangled, both sides begin to suspect that someone is betraying the other.
Three men find a crashed plane, a dead pilot and a bag of money in the snow. What starts as a quiet decision to keep the cash spirals into suspicion, lies and violence, as each tries to hold together a plan that keeps changing.
Seven members of a university mystery club sail to a remote island that was the scene of an unsolved family murder a year earlier. Cut off by a storm, they are killed one by one, and the survivors must use the rules of detective fiction to name the killer before none are left.
A journalist barred from flying takes a cross-country train from Washington to Los Angeles for a Christmas story. Along the way he meets an old love, a thief, and a trainload of strangers, and the journey becomes a second chance he did not expect.
A young German soldier boards a troop train bound for the Eastern Front. Convinced he will die within days, he watches the passengers and countryside pass by, and begins to wonder whether fate can be resisted.
Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired killers riding to California to find a prospector. As the brothers travel, Eli grows tired of the violence of their trade and begins to imagine another life, while Charlie insists that the job must be finished.
Bernie Rhodenbarr is a polite, skilled burglar who never hurts anyone and only steals from people who can afford it. Hired to steal a small blue box from a Manhattan apartment, he is still there when the police arrive and a dead body is found in the bedroom. To clear his name he has to work out how the murder was done.
A husband and wife in a Florida suburb look like an ordinary couple, but they share a secret pastime that has to stay hidden. As the double life grows harder to manage, the narrator finds the person he knows best is the one he trusts least.
Sold and condemned, the girl Nona Grey is saved from the gallows by the Convent of Sweet Mercy, where young women are trained as warriors and killers. Between lessons in blade and poison she makes friends and enemies and a promise, while the past that marked her comes looking.
Ten years after surviving a massacre at a remote cabin in the woods, Quincy has built a quiet life out of pills, baking and careful routine. When another survivor from that group of women dies and a third turns up at her door, the past she cannot fully remember starts to close in again.
Celaena Sardothien, the kingdom's most notorious assassin, is dragged from a salt mine to compete in a contest for the king. Victory would buy her freedom, but the court is full of plots and her rivals will do anything. Between a prince and a guardsman, she searches for who she can trust.
A woman with no money and a criminal record takes a live-in job cleaning for a wealthy family. The wife is cruel, the husband is kind, and a locked door upstairs keeps drawing her attention as the household's rules grow stranger.
As a teenager, Tessa was the only victim to survive the killer who buried girls in a Texas field of wildflowers, and her testimony sent a man to death row. Nearly twenty years later, fresh flowers appear near her home, and lawyers ask her to recover the memories she lost.
Start with “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”, “The Passenger”, “A Train in Winter”: they are the closest to “Bullet Train” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Bullet Train” these are Train Journey, Assassin Protagonist, Morally Grey Character), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “A Train in Winter”, “Gone Girl”, “Compartment No. 6”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
