The Art of the Chase: Top 10 Must-Read On-the-Run Thrillers
Posted on July 30, 2025
by Amy H
There’s something wonderfully compelling about someone on the run. It doesn’t really even matter from what or to what, it’s just the will-they-make-it mystery that keeps us hooked. Here are 10 of the best pursuit thrillers to get your adrenaline pumping.
the passenger by Lisa Lutz
She's left her dead husband -- and within forty-eight hours Tanya Dubois is a fugitive. It's almost impossible to live off the grid today, but Tanya-once-Amelia-now-Debra and Blue, a bartender, have the courage, the ingenuity, and the desperation, to try. Hopscotching from city to city, Debra especially is chased by a very dark secret ... can she outrun her past?
no country for old men by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy creates a heart-racing and violent pursuit thriller that stays with you long after you’ve finished the book. While out hunting antelope in rural south Texas, Llewelyn Moss finds and takes a satchel containing $2.4m in cash after stumbling upon a group of dead bodies that looks like a drug deal gone wrong. But the money belongs to some powerful people who hire hitman Anton Chigurh to retrieve it. Chigurh has strong tracking skills and Moss is in way over his head. The brutal chase spills south into Mexico as the inscrutable hitman, armed with a cattle bolt gun, closes on his prey.
alias emma by Ava Glass
Newly minted secret agent, Emma Makepeace has barely graduated from basic training when she gets the call for her first major assignment. She must covertly travel across one of the world's most watched cities to bring the reluctant son of Russian dissidents into protective custody, avoiding assassins from the Motherland determined to find him. With London's security system hacked by the Russian government, the two must cross the city without being seen by the hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras that document every inch of the city's streets, alleys, and gutters. Buses, subways, cars, and trains are out of the question. Traveling on foot, and operating without phones or bank cards that could reveal their location or identity, they have twelve hours to make it to safety. This will take all of Emma's skills of disguise and subterfuge. But when Emma's handler goes dark, there's no one left to trust. And just one wrong move will get them both killed.
rogue male by Geoffrey Household
This is quite possibly the best escape and pursuit novel ever written. 1930-something: a professional hunter is passing through an unnamed Central European country that is in the thrall of a vicious dictator. The hunter wonders whether he can penetrate undetected into the dictator's private compound. He does and has the potential target in his sites, wondering whether to pull the trigger when security catches up with him. Imprisoned, tortured, doomed to a painful death, the hunter makes an extraordinary and harrowing escape, fleeing through enemy territory to the safety of his native England. But that safety is delusive: his pursuers will not be diverted from their revenge by national borders; the British government cannot protect him without seeming to endorse his deed. The hunter must flee society, and he goes underground, like a fox to its earth. The hunter has become the hunted.
ruth run by Elizabeth Kaufman
Twenty-six-year-old Ruth excels at microchip design but decides to get rich the old-fashioned way: robbing banks. She becomes a cybercriminal and devotes five years to siphoning more than $250 million out of the banking system using a hacked firewall chip that she created and only she knows how to access. Then one night an alarm goes off and she realizes she's been discovered. Five hours later she's on the run, chased across California and the West by a slew of government agents who see her as both a high-level national security threat and a potential intelligence asset. They'll catch her dead or alive--whatever it takes to make sure no one else discovers what she knows. Each of these men is obsessed with the woman he's hunting, certain he knows what makes her tick. But Ruth, always a step ahead, armed with her ironic wit and a reluctant dog, eludes their understanding; can she elude their capture, too?
the thirty-nine steps by John Buchan
Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot that could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
the prone gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Widely considered his finest work, this 1981 novella-length noir thriller demonstrates how Manchette is credited with rescuing French crime fiction from methodical police procedurals. Professional assassin Martin Terrier wants out of the game, but his bosses won’t allow it and instruct him to eliminate an Arab oil magnate. Terrier flees south but is tracked by his firm and forced to undertake the mission. Each side will stop at nothing to get their way and, as the stakes rise, Manchette’s terse prose and deep characterization explores Terrier’s primitive fears and burning desire to live on his own terms.
witch hunt by Ian Rankin
This is the first of three novels Rankin wrote under the pen name Jack Harvey in the 1990s. Former MI5 operative Dominic Elder comes out of retirement to resume his obsessive hunt for a female assassin known as ‘Witch’ who has eluded him for years and appears to have resurfaced. Elder teams up with young spook Michael Barclay and a colleague from France also fresh out of spy school, Dominique Herault, as they chase the Witch’s trail across England, France, Scotland, and Germany in a deftly plotted pursuit laced with plenty of friction and intrigue.
eye of the needle by Ken Follett
In 1944 a German aristocrat and master spy, code named "The Needle" becomes the object of the most desperate manhunt in history after discovering the Allies' D-Day deception plan. A thrilling chase across England ensues as MI5 pursues him and his fate falls into the hands of a young and vulnerable English woman, whose loyalty, if swayed, would assure his freedom-and likely win the war for the Nazis. . . .
november road by Lou Berney
Frank Guidry, loyal lieutenant to New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, has learned that everybody is expendable. But now it's his turn--he knows too much about the crime of the century, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Within hours of JFK's murder, people with ties to Marcello are turning up dead and Guidry suspects he's next. With few good options, he hits the road to Las Vegas to see an old acquaintance who hates Marcello enough to help Guidry vanish. Maybe. But then he catches sight of a woman on the side of the road with a broken-down car, two young daughters and a dog in the backseat, he sees the perfect disguise, a way to cover his tracks and outrun the hit men on his trail. Posing as an insurance salesman, Guidry offers to help Charlotte reach her destination, California. But Charlotte is on the run, too, and determined to give herself and her kids a new life. The two fugitives realize they are meant for each other, but Guidry's relentless and murderous hunters are closing in on him. Guidry discovers that he doesn't just want to survive, he wants to really live, maybe for the first time. Everyone's expendable, or they should be, but now Guidry can't abandon the woman and two little girls he's come to love. And it might get all of them killed.
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