6 Great Thrillers About Mothers and Daughters and Sisters

My mother started lying to me when I was about ten. 

It all started at Thanksgiving. Mom would make two turkeys, because there were always a lot of family and friends. And in one turkey she’d put regular stuffing, but the other turkey would have disgusting hideous oyster stuffing. (That’s what us kids called it.) My sisters and I refused to eat the oyster stuffing, and mom would reassure us that there was plenty of plain, and not to worry. Which we did not do.

Many many years later, way after I had finished college and was out on my own, I came home for Thanksgiving and Mom was making the two turkeys as usual. I saw the one big bowl of stuffing, and then… I saw her dump the oysters into that one bowl. I gasped. “Mom,” I said “Oh no! You put oysters in the whole bowl of stuffing. Now it’s ruined.” (I had still not gotten over the oyster thing.)

Mom looked at me with a tiny bit of sympathy. “Oh honey,” she said, “there have never been two kinds of stuffing. You kids have been eating oyster stuffing for years, and loving it.”

“You lied to us!” I cried out. We were… betrayed.

You lied to us. One of the tectonic things that changes the balance in a family relationship. Oh sure, we all lied to our parents, about whatever little things, or sometimes big things, it’s a rite of passage. But we never assumed our parents were lying to us. 

Mother, daughter, sister, stranger. Every woman in the world is at least one of those. And some of us are all of them. And some of them will lie to you. 

Because sometimes, even our mothers and our daughters and our sisters turn out to be strangers. They do things we never could have predicted, have secrets we never could have guessed.  They cause us to do things we never could have imagined. They want things—sometimes things that belong to us. And they know how to push our buttons and control us.

The singular and percolating relationship that simmers from the women in a family can involve the greatest of joys, or the most sinister of dangers. Because our mothers, daughters, and sisters have lives separate from ours, they may be tempted to use their proximity and insider information to change their world—and ours. 

My newest thriller, Mother Daughter Sister Stranger, begins with the sisters—Eliza Ramsey and her older sister Bea, the sole survivors of the tragic plane crash that killed their mother and father. They are bonded by that tragedy, and devoted to each other. So when Bea disappears, something must be hideously wrong. What makes it worse—she seems to have abandoned her pre-teen daughter, and left little Piper in her Aunt Eliza’s care. What makes it even worse is that it is, to the day, the eleventh anniversary of that plane crash. Where is Bea? And why did she vanish on this particular day?

So you see the structure: a missing mom, a terrified daughter, and a determined sister who will stop at nothing until she gets some answers—even if it threatens to reveal their family’s dangerous legacy. Only a stranger knows the truth… But maybe that stranger is someone they know.  

Mother, daughter, sister, stranger—that delicate perilous balance of relationships, that precarious belief system that colors so many of our lives. Can you really trust your own family? Have you been told the truth about your past? So many terrific crime fiction authors have used the mother-daughter-sister-stranger dynamic to create their riveting stories.

Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell. Two different mothers, with two very different daughters. But their orbits collide around the same dangerous stranger. This instant classic, a series of multiple triangles is told with Jewell’s incomparable style, chilling and endlessly twisty. It also reveals how mothers and daughters—if they pay attention—can protect each other from potentially tragic desire

The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths. Diaries are supposed to be secret, that’s inviolable. And in this brilliant gothic-adjacent thriller, the mother and the daughter are each keeping one. When there’s a murder and both diaries become pivotal evidence, what the mother and daughter learn about each other’s devastating secrets in these no-longer-private entries will keep you turning the pages as fast as you can. This is a perfect book club book—when the killer uses the daughter as leverage, how will the vulnerable mom stop them?

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Who would Amazing Amy be if her mother hadn’t named her that? This gripping and seminal study of the devastating results of parental pressure was a book that changed everything in crime fiction. (Bet you never thought about it that way, right?) Not only had Amy’s mother relentlessly and publicly used her daughter for her own benefit, and now Amy’s use of her own “daughter” becomes nothing but a weapon. Deeply psychological and deeply disturbing, and no wonder the New York Times named it the best of the century. 

Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen. Mother and daughter are oh-so-close. Inseparable. Completely suffocatingly inseparable. When the daughter wants to leave, the mother has other ideas. With gripping and gaslighting twists, and revelations of the secrets each of them was keeping, this is a riveting high wire act about the shattering of trust and family history.

Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter. We think we know our moms, and that sometimes incorrect assumption is the key to this chilling and surprising novel. What a daughter has been told by her mother versus what turns out to be true crash both of their lives into disaster. And the mother’s instant instinct to protect her daughter—and the revelation that she must not be who she said she was—is the inciting incident of the story.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Of course this book is the prime example of an absolute page turner, a wrenching World War II action-spy-resistance adventure on multiple levels. But thematically, it also explores the bond of sisterhood, how sisters can take different paths, and how sisters can have two very different ways of looking at the world. And so fascinating: the catalyst for their distinct personalities and worldviews came from their mother, who died when they were very young. Her death left them with a depth of loss and a search for purpose—and her trunk of personal possessions becomes pivotal in their own stories. Can you believe this book came out in 2015? It is still terrific.

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