Twisty Mystery: 6 Crime Novels with Astonishing Narrative Turns

I labor intensively over the twists in my novels, and what strikes me most of all is that the best writers make a twist look so easy, a flick of a wrist in a magic trick. In all of my novels, but especially my latest two releases, Caller Unknown and That Night, I engage in what I call “fair dealing” with the reader: all of the information is presented fairly to you so that you should be able to guess the twist. But you won’t.

Here are six novels that do the same.

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Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

Nobody does a plot twist better than Lisa Jewell, and this one is a corker! Ten years after Laurel Mack’s fifteen-year-old daughter Ellie disappeared and was never found, she’s trying to pull her life back together. Enter Floyd, a charming, charismatic gentleman who she can’t help but fall for, but there’s a needling feeling that Laurel eventually can’t ignore when she meets his young daughter, Poppy.

Told from multiple perspectives, and alternating from present day to flashback chapters, this book will keep you guessing right until the end.

Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen, The Wife Between Us

Vanessa is recently divorced from wealthy, charming Richard and has developed an unhealthy taste for booze, plus obsession with his new fiancée, Nellie. Or has she?

As we alternate between Vanessa’s present day and Nellie’s countdown to her wedding we’re made to question the unhinged ex-wife narrative and ask who’s actually the victim and who’s the predator in this twisty, surprising thriller.

Tana French, The Witch Elm

Toby Hennessy is an easy-going PR guy from Dublin who is living a charmed life until he is brutally assaulted by two burglars in his apartment and left with a brain injury and memory loss. He moves into his dying uncle’s home to recuperate and what follows is a surprising and astonishing unravelling of long held family secrets and loyalties when some human bones are discovered. As Toby grapples with his returning memory, we watch him begin to question everything he thought he knew.

Beautifully written and perfectly paced, I loved the way this novel gradually revealed itself. The ending ticks the perfect twist box for me of being both surprising and totally, damningly inevitable.

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Really, this is the first psychological thriller. Our unnamed narrator meets and marries Max de Winter, a brooding, older widower who takes her home to Manderley, his grand estate in Cornwall, England. The house is filled with the presence of Max’s dead wife Rebecca who was beautiful, charming and adored by everyone, but as the novel unfolds we learn that their picture-perfect marriage was not at all as it seemed from the outside.

A true classic.

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

Dominic Salt and his three children are the only residents on sub-Antarctic Shearwater Island where they look after the world’s largest seed vault. When a strange woman washes ashore looking for her husband, a web of secrets and lies gradually reveals itself, leading to a devastating finale. I adored the wild, rustic setting of this novel which left me breathless as I turned the final pages.

Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark

In 1970s Missouri thirteen-year-old “Patch” Macauley heroically saves his childhood crush from an attacker but is instead kidnapped and imprisoned himself. When Saint, Patch’s only friend, eventually finds him, he is changed forever and obsessed with finding the girl who cared for him in his captivity.

As the decades pass and Patch and Saint’s lives unfold, we’re taken on an extraordinary journey which reveals small-town secrets and unexpected revelations. I guess most twists, but not this one.

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