I’m not sure if my new thriller The Next to Die (published in the UK as The Narrow Bed) is a book with a twist or not. Maybe you can help me to answer that question. Here’s the blurb:
What if having a best friend could put you in the crosshairs of a killer?
A psychopath the police have dubbed “Billy Dead Mates” is targeting pairs of best friends, and killing them one by one. Before they die, each victim is given a small white book.
For months, detectives have failed to catch Billy, or figure out what the white books mean and why the killer leaves them behind. The police are on edge; the public in a panic. Then a woman, scared by what she’s seen on the news, comes forward. What she reveals shocks the investigators and adds another troubling layer to an already complex case.
Stand-up comedian Kim Tribbeck has one of Billy’s peculiar little books. A stranger gave it to her at a gig she did last year. Was the stranger Billy, and is he targeting her—or is it something more nefarious? Kim has no friends and trusts no one, so how—and why—could Billy Dead Mates want to target her? If it’s not her, then who will be the next to die?
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the police are (kind of obviously) wrong to assume the killer is targeting pairs of best friends, when Kim has no friends and yet he’s targeted her. However, the killer definitely is targeting pairs of people who (until Kim comes into it) happen to be best friends. When it turns out that the paired victims are being selected according to a quite different and much stranger logic, is that a twist? Or is it merely a surprising resolution? My last thriller, Keep Her Safe, has a massive turns-everything-around twist on the very last page. That’s very different, in crime fiction terms, from an unguessable resolution.
The word “twist” exerts a strange power over crime fiction addicts like me. Publishers know this all too well, which is why the promise of a twist is often used to advertise books that don’t have twists at all. “You’ll never see the breathtaking twist coming!” screams the press release. Well, no, you won’t, because it doesn’t exist. And so many people think a brilliant resolution is the same thing as a twist. It isn’t. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express offers the most impressive puzzle solution in all of detective fiction. But, however ingenious and surprising, it’s not a twist ending.
So what is a bona fide twist? In my view, it has to be something that overturns or negates an already drawn conclusion or a firmly entrenched and reasonable assumption (Orient Express overturns an unreasonable assumption on the part of the reader, which is why I wouldn’t call it a twist).
Writing a twist isn’t an exact science, but part of what makes the brilliant ones so attractive in fiction is that feeling of having everything you thought you knew reversed, inverted or demolished; the fictional equivalent of being on a rollercoaster that suddenly turns upside down, leaving everything looking and feeling very different for the rest of the ride. And the new picture created by the shake-up of the twist has to be one that makes sense and is not risible. For example, if you find out at the end of the novel that the murderer is not the person whose fingerprints were on the knife, but rather his long-dead second cousin who developed marvelous fingerprint-forging technology unknown to science or the reader—that’s not a twist, it’s a travesty.
It’s going to be very hard to do this without spoilers, but I will try. In my opinion, these are 15 excellent examples of novels with genuine twists:
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Everyone told me before I started reading this superb, moving novel about a very unusual family that I should make sure not to find out the twist beforehand. People who’d read it knowing the twist said they wished they hadn’t known it, so I made sure to avoid all reviews until I’d experienced it first hand. This isn’t a mystery novel, so the twist is an unconventional one. It also comes very early in the book, but it is nevertheless one of the most surprising, satisfying and stunning twists I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It’s a real key-changer, and it takes the novel to a whole new level of brilliance.
The Wife Between Us by Sarah Pekkanen and Greer Hendricks
This slick thriller about a man who treats women in a not-ideal way, and how those women respond, is gripping, elegantly written, and very cleverly structured. I loved every page, and am now finding myself equally gripped by Hendricks and Pekkanen’s follow-up, An Anonymous Girl, which so far is even better. The twist in The Wife Between Us is one that I did in fact guess quite early on, but no one else I know guessed it, and it’s a fantastic concept whether you guess it or not.
The Witch Elm Tana French
French is my favorite living crime writer. Her books are magic—it’s as simple as that. This one, about a skull found in a tree trunk many years after it first became a skull, contains a twist so unusual and unexpected that it turns everything you think you’ve learned and understood on its head. Apart from anything else, it turns up in a place where you’d least expect to find a twist… You’ll have to read it to understand what I mean!
A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
This is possibly McDermid’s finest novel, set in England’s peak district and a brilliant portrait of life and relationship networks in a small village. It’s the story of a retired detective who remains haunted by a case he failed to solve many years ago. The twist in this book is one that creeps up on you, with realization coming not all at once but in several satisfying stages.
The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn
This latest smash-hit mega-bestseller by a new and brilliant writer contains a twist that gives the reader a real ‘parallax view’ sensation. Suddenly, quite late in the novel, you realize that one of the key assumptions you made early on in the story is not what it seems to be. A gripping page-turner from start to finish.
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
A moving, complex moral-dilemma story about a girl who takes her family to court in order to win the right to refuse a life-saving bone marrow transplant to her dying sister. What’s great about the twist is that you were neither waiting nor hoping for it—the story feels totally satisfying and complete without it—and yet when it arrives, you realize that there was a carefully and subtly carved space all throughout the novel for that perfect twist to fit into.
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
A psychological suspense classic about a woman who marries a man she adores, only to discover that he, his home and his staff are apparently still obsessed by his far more charismatic first wife, to whom our heroine fears she can never measure up. Without revealing anything that’s gone before to be a lie, the twist changes the meaning of everything we’ve seen so far and provides the novel with an exemplary and memorable resolution.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Not all superb twists need to come at the end. There’s a twist in the middle of this classic novel that takes it to another level of passion, intrigue and excitement. There are hints before the big reveal, but not even the most imaginative reader would dare to imagine the truth. Twists in the middles of stories rather than at their ends tend to say: “And what do we all think now?” rather than, “So THIS is what we’re supposed to think!”—and this one does that brilliantly.
Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson
An unputdownable novel about a woman who loses her memory every night as she sleeps, and wakes each next morning remembering nothing. The author expertly leads the reader to assume that there is a binary choice in terms of who and what to suspect, and then reveals at the last moment that there is a third and even more terrifying possibility…
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
You can tell when a twist is brilliant, because copycats spring up all over. The twist at the end of Lionel Shriver’s masterpiece about a school shooting and a difficult mother-son relationship is one that literally takes your breath away. I’ve read two novels since that have copied and pasted Shriver’s twist as if it hadn’t been done before (or perhaps they simply hadn’t read Kevin!). Either way, neither of the copycats used the twist with Shriver’s panache.
Innocent Blood by PD James
I know I don’t have to choose a No 1 – this is, after all, a top 10 – but this novel contains my favorite twist in all of crime fiction. Halfway through this story of an adopted young woman determined to trace her biological parents, there is a twist that made me leap up off my sun-lounger and yell at random holiday makers that they needed to read this book urgently. I won’t say any more—just, please, read it.
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
This novel about a US Marshal trapped on an island, trying to find an escaped murderer in a sanatorium, has a twist of such audacity, I’m not sure I’d have dared, but I’m very glad Lehane did. It’s so bold and all-encompassing, it’s perfect.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
This brilliant thriller contains a meta-twist, devised and inflicted by a central character within the novel rather than the author herself. It’s a middle-twist rather than an end-twist, and the character responsible spends much of the novel afterward boasting about it. It works exceptionally well.
The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell
A brilliant crime novel by one of the UK’s finest crime writers, in which the murder itself is the twist. You won’t understand what I mean by that—so you must read the book! The last line, which underscores how profoundly the reader has been fooled, sent a shiver down my spine.
Behind Closed Doors by B A Paris
I’m not sure all readers would recognize that this is a twist-based story, but it is. It twists our expectations of the entire psychological thriller genre. The novel begins as a portrait of a marriage in which the wife seems to be a little nervous around her husband… What could possibly be going on? Is he abusive? Does she have a guilty secret? I liked this novel from the start, but a few chapters in, one of the main characters provides information that’s so startling, it shakes up all of the reader’s expectations about the genre they think they’re reading, making the rest of the story all the more exciting.
