Treasure the friend who makes you look and feel better: the one who’s quick with a compliment; who picks up the check and your mood when romances go awry; the one who makes you feel like a better person.
Those are not the friends this list is about. Below you’ll find cheaters, liars, and a few killers—the kind of friends whose presence in your life makes it harder or worse. We’ll call these toxic friends, and we find them all over crime fiction. Here are just a few of our favorite messed up friendships.
Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People
The center of Necessary People is a complicated friendship between the rich Stella and the up from rags Violet. Violet is an achiever and a hard worker, and she’s making her mark at the cable news station where she landed an internship as a producer out of college. Flighty Stella is off cavorting with minor royalty and dissolute aristocracy as the novel begins. When Stella returns, however, she also develops a taste for working at the cable station, but she wants to be on-air talent. Pitoniak is a shrewd observer of female attachment and ambition, and People both delivers interesting ideas and chronicles a shocking murder.
Tara Isabella Burton, Social Creature
When Louise is befriended by the rich and popular socialite Lavinia, her world blossoms into something unrecognizable, full of parties, champagne, high-quality drugs, and lots of good-looking and interesting people. Both writers, soon Louise is wearing Lavinia’s clothes, going out with Lavinia every night, and generally living the high life. Their friendship inches from extremely close to toxic, with Louise frantic about doing anything to make the mercurial Lavinia angry. Social Creature is a carefully plotted and brilliantly executed book, which dives deep into privilege, class, wealth, art, and female friendships.
Megan Abbott, The End of Everything
Among Abbott’s many gifts is a talent for describing the nuances and the extremes of female relationships, from the most intimate friendships to the most hostile enemies. In Everything she gives us Lizzie Hood and Evie Verver, thirteen-year-old neighbors and best friends. When Evie disappears, Lizzie does her own investigation and discovers secrets about her best friend that make her wonder if she really knew Evie at all.
Christopher Yates, Black Chalk
Yates’s Black Chalk is a slow burn of a thriller. We first meet one of the book’s narrators (I don’t want to spoil it so let’s leave him unnamed) living in New York City in a hermetic and just plain weird state. As the novel unfolds, we learn the narrator was part of a group of six friends at Oxford who challenged one another to do embarrassing or risky things. The revelations in Black Chalk are deliberately slow and menacing, which both ratchets up suspense and allows for some interesting character development.
Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist
Rose Baker works as a typist for the New York City Police Department in the 1920s. Though she records the most outrageous acts, her life is mundane until Odalie joins the typing pool. Then there are nightclubs, jazz, cocktails. Rose starts to feel things for Odalie while Odalie is taking advantage of the naïve Rose. Together they are a toxic cocktail ready to explode.
Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
Eileen gives us yet another anxious—or bored—protagonist. Eileen Dunlop likes shoplifting, She’s is a secretary at a boy’s prison during the day and the caretaker for her S.O.B. father after work, when she also fantasizes about escaping to another city. It’s no wonder she’s irresistibly attracted to the pretty, peppy Rebecca Saint John, the new prison counselor, and a woman who has taken advantage of innocent miscreants like Eileen.
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Women are not the only ones who can have toxic friendships. Exhibit A, and essential to the founding of the trope is Tom Ripley. Ripley, desperate to move among the very rich, gets himself hired to find the son of a rich guy: a young man named Dickie Greenleaf who has disappeared in Italy. Tom finds him irresistible, but Dickie is obsessed with Marge, an American dilettante. The constant shifting of alliances and affection runs through Highsmith’s five Ripley novels, one of the few books in which she alluded to homosexual feelings (Highsmith was a lesbian).
Megan Miranda, The Last House Guest
Littleport, Maine is an idyllic enclave for the wealthy. Their summer homes comprise the bulk of the real estate along the rugged coastline. House Guest reveals the inner workings of this bucolic setting through the friendship of a working-class local woman, Avery Greer, who works for the family of her moneyed best friend Sadie Loman, whose family owns a chunk of the town’s rental properties. The book begins when Sadie’s body is found on the night of the annual end-of-season party. Though it’s ruled a suicide, Avery is convinced her friend met with foul play, and her investigation into Sadie’s death is also a tour through the complex relationships of the locals and the summer people of Littleport.
