In early 2020, I began writing a new story—a domestic thriller with one of the most terrifying premises I could imagine: an armed and masked invader who forces his way into a woman’s home and holds her and her two children captive. It’s an idea that didn’t come out of nowhere. I live for much of the year in Atlanta, and this was a scenario I’d seen all too often on the nightly news, one that happened to people I knew, even. It’s a premise that was firmly grounded in my day-to-day reality—which in my mind, made it that much scarier.
But as I was writing it, a dystopian reality began brewing outside my four walls. Anytime I turned on the TV, that was where the true terror began. The forklifts moving bodies into mass graves, the food bank lines that stretched for miles, the hospitals overflowing with sick and dying. Suddenly, a home invasion was no longer the scariest thing that could happen to my characters, or to me.
Thanks to the lockdown—or maybe despite it—I pounded out the first draft of My Darling Husband in record time, four months and by far the fastest I’ve ever written a novel. It’s my pandemic book that has nothing to do with the pandemic, and I wondered at the time if anyone would ever read it. We were already living in a thriller, all of us in thriller overload. Who wants another suspense novel when the real world is so intense and dangerous?
And yet all these months later, thrillers are still as popular are ever. People are still picking up thrillers in order to be thrilled, still reading suspense to escape the chaos of the real world. For me, that’s always been the magic of story: to console and inspire, to sweep us out of our own difficult realities and transport us to a fictional world. And if there’s one thing we could all use right now, it’s a bit of magic.
Here are some of the suspense novels I read and loved this past year, with writing so crisp and plots so compelling they made me forget all about the pandemic raging outside my doors.
The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jake is a promising young novelist with a well-received first book, but can’t manage to produce a second. A teacher at a third-rate MFA program, he’s floundering when one of his students shares the plot for a book, a story too good not to steal…and steal it Jake does. A year later he is famous, wealthy, successful beyond his wildest dreams. And then an e-mail arrives with the message, you are a thief. Suspenseful and compulsively readable, with an ending I didn’t see coming.
What’s Done in Darkness, Laura McHugh
A brilliant thriller about Sarah, a woman who must revisit her own kidnapping in order to save the life of another missing girl. But as she begins to face her difficult past, Sarah unwittingly unleashes forces that put her life in peril. Alternate time periods add to the suspense while also doling out little pieces of what really happened all those years ago. Set in the menacing Ozarks amid a cluster of ultra-religious families, this is one heart-stopping wild ride.
Who Is Maud Dixon?, Alexandra Andrews
Talk about transporting me up and away, this book takes us to exotic Morocco after young, ambitious Florence lands her dream job as an assistant to a famous but anonymous writer. She knows an opportunity when she sees one, and maybe this research trip will finally give her something to write about and fulfill her quest to become a celebrated writer. But when Florence wakes up in the hospital after a car crash that killed her boss, she begins to imagine what it would be like to take over her boss’s bestselling pseudonym. A fresh, modern take on an old classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley.
The Younger Wife, Sally Hepworth
When Stephen announces he’s getting remarried, his adult daughters are not pleased with the news. His fiancé is a gold digger and far too young, but there’s a bigger problem. Stephen is still legally married to his first wife, the girls’ mother who is currently in a care facility for dementia—a hurdle Stephen sidesteps by divorcing her. Marriages don’t get much more messed up than the ones in this book, a twisty tale filled with punchy prose.
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