July brings with it simply an embarrassment of riches when it comes to psychological thrillers. I know it’s becoming my constant refrain, but there are just too many good books. Here are 11 excellent additions to the suspense genre, all quite thrilling, all perfect for summer reading, and all full of memorable characters in singular settings (especially the beauty pageant—truly nightmare fuel). I hope these keep you reading late into the night, and long into the next day.
Kelsey Cox, Pretty Dead Things
(Minotaur)
Texas beauty queens have long been a true crime punchline, but Kelsey Cox takes the pageant competitors—and the world that created them—seriously, . Pretty Dead Things is set in a tight-knit Texas town slowly being swallowed by Austin’s mushrooming metropolis. On the eve of the town’s long-running beauty pageant, and 25 years after the disappearance of a pageant queen’s daughter tore the community apart, Winter Storm Uri descends, trapping all the contestants with their families. The powerful storm serves as backdrop to accusations, recriminations, and vengeance, for an excellent thriller that doesn’t hesitate to explore the darker side of pageant culture.
Rowan Beaird, Tenderness
(Flatiron)
Rowan Beaird’s latest, a slow-burn mystery set in the 1970s, takes place on a remote island that will soon host a wedding celebration between an old-money groom and his penniless aristocrat of a fiancee. The bride is recently escaped from a cult and enigmatic in her commitment to her intended; she yearns for escape, for freedom, and for a real chance at love, and feels stifled by the trappings of wealth and convention. The rarified guests have gathered in expectation of scandal, gossip, and perhaps a visit from the cult’s remaining members, while the mysterious bride stays a force of gravity at the center of the celebration, a mirror for all her friends and family and their many insecurities, even as they refuse to acknowledge her own rich interior life or the unvarnished truths behind her supposedly shocking actions. Tenderness is an astute study of human behavior, and a complex portrait of a resonant era.
Catherine Cho, The Devoted
(Washington Square Press)
This dark romantic thriller takes us into the world of the Triads, centered around a single question: how far would you tempt fate for the promise of love? As Cho’s narrator, the daughter of a gangster, grows up in ignorance and privilege, she finds herself falling for her childhood friend, now a leader in the same underworld that once destroyed her father. Can she risk loss again, for a brief moment in the sun? Or does she condemn her lover the moment she succumbs to her feelings? A stirring tale that mixes high emotion with mafia realpolitik, this one should make for an excellent miniseries.
Laura Sims, The Man
(Putnam)
This book is one of the few stories I’ve ever read that successfully pulled off the mid-novel twist. I can’t tell you much more without spoiling it, but to briefly summarize: The Man follows a housewife with a rare talent in photography as she is pushed towards publicizing her brilliance, with deadly results. Sims’ latest profoundly captures the essence of Cicero’s favored saying: cui bono? Who benefits, indeed.
Mallory Arnold, Cross My Heart I Hope You Die
(Poisoned Pen Press)
I loved this clever revenge story, pitched as John Tucker Must Die meets Cabin in the Woods, in which three women who’ve all been dating the same man (and loaning him money) devise a fiendish plan to scare him into admitting his guilt. One of the spurned lovers has just inherited a remote cabin, one that seems tailor-made to scare a weeny into saying he’s a scrub: the walls are covered in grotesque graffiti, the attic is full of buckets of blood, and the surrounding forest holds the warped remnants of an apocalyptic cult. What could go wrong?
Catherine Ryan Howard, Buyer Beware
(Simon & Schuster)
Catherine Ryan Howard will always be in my thriller hall of fame for writing a pandemic novel that was actually good (the use of lockdown to create suspense in 56 Days is unmatchable), and I can’t wait to dive into her latest. In Buyer Beware, a new homeowner discovers a sinister history behind the tony remodel, a history her neighbors would do anything to keep buried, while additional narrators fill in all the nasty gaps in the building’s dark past. Given Howard’s mastery of claustrophobic settings and the trappings of domesticity, this one is sure to keep the pages turning.
Jessica Knoll, Helpless
(Scribner)
A Jessica Knoll novel is always cause for celebration, and this, her fourth, preserves her reputation for intense characterizations and emotional depth, while also a rollicking good crime story. When Knoll’s heroine goes to bury her old mentor, she runs into an ex-boyfriend who made her feel things she’s never found since, and never knew how to ask for. Her ex, too, has some unresolved issues with their breakup—enough to drug, kidnap, and take her to a remote cabin, where he plans to talk things through with her once and for all. Nothing in this twisted tale is what I expected, and with a novel from Knoll, I’d expect nothing less.
Isabella Valeri, The Prodigal Daughter
(Atria/Emily Bestler Books)
I loved Valeri’s debut, Letters from the Dead, a perfectly gothic potboiler which first introduced her flame-haired Machiavellian heiress and the nasty relations trying to keep her from either inheritance or escape. The Prodigal Daughter picks up just where the previous volume left off, as Valeri’s heroine has been spirited away from her lover and her brief chance at freedom, forced back to the family estate to be married off to whichever suitor best furthers both their financial imperatives and aristocratic bloodlines. The put-upon scion intends to be much more than a brood mare for the dwindling upper classes, if only she can get her hands on enough secrets to win her independence. I finished this one far too quickly, and now I must wait two years for the next installment…Sigh.
V.A. Vazquez, The Death Row Club
(Gallery)
The set-up for this one is irresistible: murder at a weekend getaway for the children of serial killers. That’s all the information anyone needs in order to know how thoroughly they’ll enjoy it. Also one of two books on this list to feature clubs!
Ashley Winstead, Hot Girl Murder Club
(Minotaur)
I believe the title says it all. But if you need any additional encouragement to dive in, then know that Ashley Winstead is a skilled practitioner of the thriller arts, excelling in the suspense world for her captivating plots, intriguing characterization, and off-the-wall twists. If Winstead writes it, then I’m reading it.
Molly Fader, Lady X
(Ballantine)
Lady X is split between the present day, where Fader’s heroine is grappling with the discovery of her Hollywood heart-throb husband’s bad behavior, and New York City in the 1970s, where the mysterious Lady X begins a series of escalating attacks against creeps, rapists, and other misogynist offenders. So good! And, depending on my future career as a graffiti-spraying vigilante painting dicks on a wall in the name of feminist justice, so inspirational…
