Black Sunday

Thomas Harris is best known for his pioneering books Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), which almost single-handedly established serial killer novels as a separate sub-genre of crime fiction. Those are both excellent, but I have a particular love for his first novel Black Sunday, an ingenious and all-too-plausible thriller about a terrorist plot to detonate a bomb at the Super Bowl using an aerial blimp. The narrative is thrilling as it tracks the bombers’ plot alongside the attempt by the FBI to thwart the attack, and has moments of psychological depth as it considers the motives of everyone involved.