The Best Psychological Thrillers of the Month: March 2022

Thriller fans, we need to talk. Don’t worry, nobody died (yet). But I feel compelled to let you know the next few months are going to be really intense. I know, we’ve had a lot of intense; but this is the good, suspenseful, kind of intensity, the kind that we chase. There is a phenomenally rich year in reading ahead of us. I am already getting alluring summer and fall titles (the powers that be are just being mean when Don Winslow’s new book arrives in January and I have nine lists to do before I should read it). Though I am not an optimist by nature, I hope you know I always give it to you straight. I feel confident here in March to say 2022 is going to be a good one for readers like you. Like us.

Here are five picks for March.

Eli Cranor, Don’t Know Tough (Soho)

This is a book I didn’t know I needed: the stirring small-town flavor of Friday Night Lights with a legit crime story (let’s not talk about the real FNL’s attempt at a crime story when a fumbling Landry revenge killed his maybe girlfriend Tyra’s assailant and he dropped his damned heirloom watch which I hoped was not like the watch in the Bruce Willis part of Pulp Fiction). Cranor’s moody story of high school football coach Trent Powers—a name that works for a porn star or a productivity guru as well as for a coach—who moves to small town Arkansas to coach a hotheaded but talented running back Billy Lowe. Lowe is a victim of abuse, and Powers is drawn into Lowe’s complicated and difficult life. Cranor’s treatment of tough guys in rough circumstances makes for an impressive debut. Yes this is Arkansas, but Texas Forever.

Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give (Simon & Schuster)

Burton plunges into the secrets of a tony prep school in Maine, St. Dunstan’s Academy, in this follow-up to her creepy Single White Female for the digital age, Social Creatures. In World we follow new student Laura Stearns to St. Dunstan’s; she’s super excited as the school was supposedly the inspiration for the school in one of her favorite books, All Before Them. Them was written by alum Sebastian Webster who died in the Spanish Civil War. Soon Laura is caught up in the rigors of the school’s chapel choir run by the daunting Virginia Strauss. Burton has done the unusual thing of taking a very familiar setting and injecting suspense into it: the simmering pressure of prep school, the perfection Virginia demands of the choir, and a school tradition of cliff diving (yes, you read that right) all serve to make Burton’s book a worthy addition to the Secret History offspring.

Louise Candlish, The Heights (Atria)

I really enjoyed Candlish’s Our House (2019) and Those People (2020), both sly looks at how quickly your neighbors can become your enemies. The Heights is not as compact a book—the claustrophobia of middle-class homeownership is Candlish’s specialty—but Candlish proves she can do more than domestic drama in this slippery story where a woman sees a man she thought she’d killed years earlier. Whoops.

Rosie Walsh, The Love of My Life (Pamela Dorman)

Ghosted, Walsh’s American debut, was a surprise hit for good reasons: what was more frightening back in those innocent years than online dating? Now it seems quaint, but Walsh really milked the ambiguity and frustration of, umm, other people. The Love of My Life is a good choice for the Paula Hawkins, Liz Nugent, or even Karin Slaughter and Laura Lippmann fans who like a love story with a shot of suspense. The gist is that our heroine has been married for ten years and has a child with her husband, Leo. He thinks he is married to Emma, a well-known marine biologist. But Emma has a past, and another name and a love she abandoned, and Leo turns dark as he uncovers more about the ghost who is his wife.

Kellye Garrett, Like a Sister (Mullholland Books)

Let’s talk about why Like a Sister is one of the best books of the young year. Garrett has been poised to break out, and people I trust have been talking her up in advance of Sister’s release. The novel is about an influencer-slash-reality TV star, a young Black woman named Desiree Pierce who is found dead at a playground in the Bronx near the apartment where her estranged half-sister, Lena Scott, lives. The press is quick to brand Desiree a drug addict and to label her death an overdose, but Lena refuses to believe that story. Instead, she investigates her sister’s recent life as well as her death to piece together what Desiree had been up to since their estrangement. Lena’s findings implicate their father, a hip-hop mogul and as family secrets surface Lena persists in her quest for the truth. What makes the book a standout is Garrett’s command of her idioms: the public’s lust for salacious information about social media and reality TV stars, people whose lives are constructed for maximum public involvement, as well as the rivalry between two sisters who have chosen very different paths. That Garrett uses hip-hop, with its bragging, beefs, and money as a backdrop is a clever, clever stroke which gives Sister added texture and nuance. Get on the Garrett train now—she is a writer who is going places, and I for one can’t wait for the next ride.