A cynical British agent with a working-class background is sent to secure the release of a kidnapped scientist. The trail leads through a shabby London of bureaucracy and betrayal to a conspiracy inside his own service. He narrates the case with dry humour and growing distrust.
A woman walks into Sam Spade's San Francisco office with a story about a missing sister, and the case becomes a hunt for a jewel-encrusted black bird. Spade's partner is killed, and he must decide whom to trust among liars, thieves and double-crossers.
Michael Smith has not spoken since a violent event in his childhood. As a teenager he discovers he can open almost any lock, a talent that draws criminals who need a safecracker. His skill also brings him to Amelia, and protecting her pulls him into an elaborate con he cannot easily escape.
Tom Ripley, a poor young man in New York, is sent to Italy by a rich shipbuilder to bring home his son Dickie. Instead Tom is drawn into Dickie's comfortable world and, when it is threatened, does whatever it takes to keep it.
Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a dying general to deal with a blackmailer, and the case leads him through a family of drifters and gamblers to a missing man and a tangle of secrets. He keeps working even when the general tells him to stop.
On a train, a charming stranger proposes an idea to architect Guy Haines: each man could murder the person ruining the other's life, since no one would suspect them. Guy dismisses it as a joke, until the other man acts on the plan and pulls him into a nightmare of guilt that neither can escape.
A disgraced financial journalist is hired by an old industrialist to solve the decades-old disappearance of his niece. His researcher is Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant, guarded hacker with her own scores to settle.
Deputy sheriff Lou Ford seems like an ordinary small-town man, but his mild manner hides a violence he has carried since childhood. When old secrets and a woman from his past resurface, his two selves begin to pull him toward more killing.
James Bond is sent to a French casino to bankrupt Le Chiffre, a Soviet-backed paymaster, at the baccarat table. When the operation ends in torture and violence, he is sent away to recover with a woman he begins to trust, unaware that the game is not over.
Insurance salesman Walter Huff is drawn to Phyllis, the alluring wife of a client, and agrees to help her kill her husband and make it look like an accident. Their scheme is carefully plotted, but the company's claims investigator begins to notice details that do not add up.
A drifter called Frank takes a job at a roadside diner and begins an affair with the owner's unhappy wife. Their plan to be together, a murder made to look like an accident, sets off a chain of events that neither of them can control.
A federal agent returns to the drought-stricken town he left twenty years ago, for the funeral of a childhood friend believed to have killed his family. Old questions about the death that drove him away surface again while he helps the local police look into a new one.
Stan Carlisle works the carnival, watching the geek at the bottom of the show and vowing never to fall that low. Clever and ambitious, he moves from a mind-reading act to spiritualist con, fleecing the rich, until his own past catches up with him.
Marid Audran survives in the Budayeen, a crowded quarter of a future Middle Eastern city where people can buy and wear other personalities as implants. When a killer starts murdering with the minds of psychopaths, the local crime boss forces Marid to hunt him down.
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.
Harry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard, listed in the phone book and usually broke. When the police consult him on a double murder, he finds a sorcerer using black magic in a city where vampires and crime bosses all want a piece of the investigation.
Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown runs a small gang on the Brighton seafront and commits a murder to hold his position. A cheerful, persistent woman who barely knew the victim decides to find out what really happened, closing in on a boy who believes he is beyond ordinary justice.
A prisoner named Takeshi Kovacs is downloaded into a new body and sent to Earth to solve the death of a wealthy man. His search through the powerful Bay City elite uncovers a wider conspiracy about who is allowed to live forever.
Case is a washed-up computer hacker living in a Japanese city, until a mysterious employer hires him for one more job. Working with a street samurai and a woman with mirrored eyes, he is drawn into a scheme far larger than the theft he was promised.
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.
Katarina Bishop has left her family's life of theft for a boarding school, but her father is accused of stealing five paintings from a dangerous collector. To save him, Kat assembles a crew of young thieves and plans a museum heist against a two-week deadline, with Interpol and a mobster close behind.
In Clanton, Mississippi, a Black father shoots the two men who attacked his young daughter and hires a young white lawyer to defend him. The town splits along racial lines as the murder trial approaches, with the Ku Klux Klan threatening the defense team and the jury.
Anita Blake raises the dead for a living and executes vampires for the state. When a frightened vampire hires her to find who is murdering the city's undead, her search pulls her into the hardboiled politics of Jean-Claude and the master vampire of St. Louis.
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.
Start with “The Ipcress File”, “The Maltese Falcon”, “The Lock Artist”: they are the closest to “The Hunter” 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 “The Hunter” these are Heist, Revenge, Betrayal), 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 “The Lock Artist”, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “The Dry”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
