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Who doesn’t love a great FBI thriller, right?
With the resurgence and subsequent success of the hit television show FBI, and its spinoffs—FBI: Most Wanted and FBI: International—I started to think about the very best thrillers involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A few titles immediately jumped to mind, but as I began to jot them down, I realized that realize that I’d much rather have an expert weigh in; someone who has some history with the FBI, and knows the world of the Bureau inside and out.
Enter F.X. Regan: a good friend of mine, who spent more than thirty-three years in law enforcement before retiring as the special agent in charge of a large FBI field division, and then turned to his new passion: writing books.
Thankfully, when I pitched the idea to Regan, he was game and handed me this list of the ten best FBI thrillers ever written, broken down and complete with all his thoughts about what makes each title so special.
Just for fun, I added a few titles of my own. You can read them all, plus more about F.X. Regan, and—of course—his list—below.
The Ten Best FBI Thrillers Ever Written
By F.X. Regan
Everybody’s heard of the FBI’s Top Ten Fugitive List, but writing my own FBI-centric novels got me thinking about what I consider to be the very best fiction books about the Bureau that I’ve read.
You’ll note from this list that I lean toward the practitioners—the individuals who were on the streets and in the trenches before they ever began writing books. Maybe it’s the authenticity they add to their stories, or perhaps it’s just me projecting as a thirty-three-year law enforcement officer turned author—you decide.
Witness To The Truth By Paul Lindsay
Full disclosure: I worked on the same squad with Paul Lindsay for several years in one of the FBI’s largest field offices and considered him a friend. I included this book first on my list because there is much realism in the interplay between the multiple FBI characters throughout several storylines. With a word of caution: the tropes and descriptions of some of them are overplayed, and knowing Lindsay, that was probably on purpose.
The protagonist, Mike Devlin, is a tough-guy FBI man who doesn’t suffer fools or management lightly, and we learn early on that these are often the same people. Lindsay and Devlin (it’s easy to envision them being one and the same) take us on a series of cases, with the main plot surrounding a serial killer who eventually kidnaps the daughter of a fellow agent. Thus, while the supervisors who occupy mahogany row can’t stand cowboys like Devlin when the feces hit the circular cooling device, that’s precisely when they need a real street agent like him to solve a tough case.
Lindsay got a lot of mileage out of writing this book while he was still an agent (not against the rules) and then having it published and accepting royalties while still on duty (FBI agents are not allowed to have outside income). He was investigated by the Inspection Division and given time off without pay, but retired before the penalty could be enforced. He claimed publicly that the Bureau came after him because his book was critical of management, which didn’t hurt his spurned agent image. Paul Lindsay would pen two other Mike Devlin novels and three other novels of the FBI in his real name before writing two additional books under the pen name Noah Boyd.
As I alluded to above, Noah Boyd, the pseudonym for Paul Lindsay, also makes my list. In The Bricklayer, we find a much more subdued, for a time anyway, Steve Vail, who has left the Bureau and traded in his gun for a trowel and is working as, well, a bricklayer. When a shadowy domestic terror group starts killing people and demanding the FBI pay them an ever-increasing ransom, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kate Bannon reaches back for Vail and his bag of tools to help solve the case.
A smart and out-of-the-box thinker, Vail is an enigmatic character who comes up with tactics and strategies the buttoned-down Bureau he left could never imagine. Most of the time, he is on his own to dodge explosions and challenges with only minimal assistance from Bannon. Considering this book was written in 2010, it could have been a template for a long-running series in a subgenre of action thrillers now dominated by Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man, characters that first appeared during approximately the same timeframe as Vail. Unfortunately, Paul Lindsay died too young in 2011, the same year his second Steve Vail novel, Agent X, came out.
Interestingly, fourteen years after it was published, The Bricklayer is now a motion picture featuring Aaron Eckhart, although in a major plot change, Vail is now a former CIA officer who comes back to address a similar challenge, but this time it’s an international conspiracy.