Have you ever heard of Frederick Valentich? I hadn’t, before I read The Wreck, a new survivalist thriller that my friends at Allen & Unwin sent me for review. In October 1978, Valentich’s plane vanished over the Bass Strait. James remembers it well, as she was flying home to Tasmania with her family on the same day as Valentich went missing (her flight even helped in the search efforts). Valentich and his plane were never found, but the story always stuck with James, and served as the inspiration for her latest novel.

The Wreck unfolds over three timelines, each spaced 20 years apart.

In 1977, beginner pilot Donovan ‘Van’ Spector vanishes in his Tiger Moth aircraft over the “Bermuda Triangle of the South” in the Bass Strait. Shortly before his disappearance, he made a chilling radio transmission to air traffic control, indicating that his plane wasn’t alone in the sky that night.

In 1997, after reports that plane wreckage has been spotted on a tiny remote island off the coast of Tasmania, a (very) small team sets out in a ramshackle fishing boat to see if they can discover what became of Spector. A collision with the surrounding reef in inclement weather sees them wrecked on the island – and they soon discover it is not uninhabited as they thought.

In 2017, a podcast investigates both mysteries: what became of Spector, and of the search party who went looking for him 20 years later?

The Wreck moves quickly, with a lot of cliffhangers that will keep you just-one-more-chapter-ing. All the way through, I kept thinking this would be the perfect book for fans of the TV show Lost (marooned on an island, no hope of rescue, and a we’re-not-alone style mystery).

And an important P.S. for fellow dog-lovers: there are a couple of fairly gruesome historical dog deaths mentioned in flash-backs, but I didn’t find them too distressing.

Read The Wreck on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)

If you’re half as Online as I am, you’re familiar with the AmITheAsshole subreddit. Normally shortened to “AITA”, the board is where people can post their conflicts and conundrums and ask others to judge whether they’re in the right. The responses are broadly sorted into three categories: “YTA” (you’re the asshole, you got this one wrong, you need to check yourself), “NTA” (not the asshole, you’re in the right, go forth and prosper), and – my favourite – “ESH” (everyone sucks here, no one is right, you all need to take a good, long hard look at yourselves). The latter category is one I’ve personally adopted as a microgenre, one I’m noticing more and more in my reading life. I call it the “Everyone Sucks Here” novel, where there is no hero and all of the primary characters deserve a big comeuppance. Here are ten books that fit that category.

Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Dangerous Liaisons is a novel where “love is not triumphant and virtue does not win out”. If this was an ATIA post, the result would be a resounding Everyone Sucks Here. It’s told through letters, mostly between the two central characters, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. These two frenemies are former lovers who get their kicks by ruining other people’s lives. Valmont is on a personal mission to seduce the virtuous, married Madame de Tourvel, just to say that he did. Merteuil thinks its a fool’s errand, and would rather he dedicate his energies to her scheme: seducing and ruining the young and innocent Cécile de Volanges, in the hopes of embarrassing her betrothed (a man she once loved who dumped her – it’s petty revenge). Read my full review of Dangerous Liaisons here.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Every character in Gone Girl – from the married couple to the childhood friends to the greasy lawyer – exists in a murky grey area. No one is entirely likeable or unlikeable, trustworthy or untrustworthy, hero or villain. In other words, Everyone Sucks Here. Nick Dunne’s wife, Amy, disappears on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary. There’s a sign of a struggle in the living room, but no other real clues as to where she’s gone. Nick and Amy’s perspectives alternate throughout the novel. They describe their marriage in very different ways, each (obviously) more sympathetic to their own cause and critical of the other. Both narrators feel unsteady, unreliable, but it’s not exactly clear why… at first. Read my full review of Gone Girl here.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen is narrated from the present(ish) day, but the protagonist is reflecting on events that took place the week of Christmas in 1964. Despite that choice for timing, I’ll warn you right now that Eileen is a holiday novel in the same sense that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That week was the last that the titular main character spent in her hometown, a small Massachusetts village she calls X-ville. She is narrating for us what she calls her ‘disappearance’ at age 24. Read my full review of Eileen here.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff was once a ruffian street-kid, with a Cinderella-esque upbringing (once the dude who took him in died, the rest of the family started being really mean). Catherine was a saucy little minx, who flirtatiously tortured Heathcliff for years, but she ultimately decided to marry the snooty guy next door instead. It was a hella dramatic household – years of drunken rages and fights and marriage proposals and death, and now a narrator is getting the whole, gnarly story from a neighbouring house’s maid. It’s all great tea, but damn, Everyone Sucks Here. Read my full review of Wuthering Heights here.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Normal People depicts four years of Connell and Marianne’s relationship, the ebbs and tides as they graduate high-school and attend Trinity College in Dublin. It’s basically the folie à deux of young love in novel form, but let me be clear: it’s not a romance novel. For most of the four year period, Connell and Marianne are barely friends, let alone lovers, and they never seem to actually like each other all that much. Read my full review of Normal People here.

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood

Elaine is an embittered artist returning to her hometown of Toronto for a retrospective of her work, to be shown at a local gallery. Cat’s Eye begins with her re-familiarising herself with the area, which causes her to think back to her childhood. Her family settled in the Canadian city when she was eight years old, after years of itinerant living while her father studied bugs (yeah, seriously). She became fast friends with two girls from her school, but their circle was broken wide open with the arrival of a new girl – Cordelia. Read my full review of Cat’s Eye here.

Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

At first glance, Fleishman Is In Trouble looks like your stock-standard New York divorce novel. A privileged couple – he’s a doctor, she’s a talent agent/manager – sniping at each other and using their kids like battering rams in the dissolution of their marriage. But by the end of the first chapter, you’ll realise that this is something different, something special. The story isn’t narrated by either of the central players, but by Libby, an old friend of Toby’s and a former journalist with her own blind-spots and biases. Her version of events isn’t unreliable, though, so much as… well, open to interpretation. Read my full review of Fleishman Is In Trouble here.

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

The Husband’s Secret is set in Sydney, where Cecilia is a (mostly) happily married mother-of-three – until she finds an envelope, written in her husband’s hand, and it says (ominous music): “For my wife, only to be opened in the event of my death”. But her husband is still very much alive, and he won’t tell her what’s inside. The story also follows Tess, a career-woman who returns to Sydney with her son after she finds out that her husband and her cousin are having an emotional affair. She enrolls her kid in the same school that Cecilia’s kids attend. And then there’s Rachel, the school secretary; she suspects that the P.E. teacher, Connor (who is, coincidentally, Tess’s ex-boyfriend), is the man responsible for the murder of her daughter thirty-odd years ago. Read my full review of The Husband’s Secret here.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Imagine a group of Popular Girls – a la Mean Girls or Heathers – who invite you to one of their parties, then promptly begin performing blood sacrifices and dark magic rituals. That’s basically the conceit of Mona Awad’s 2019 break-through novel, Bunny. Samantha Mackey is completing her MFA at a small New England liberal arts cottage, and she’s the outsider in her workshop class. The rest of the participants are Bunnies, a hyperfeminine clique of young women with wealth and pretty privilege in spades. Samantha’s only friend is Ava, a punk chain smoker who resents the university and the Bunnies and just about everything else. Read my full review of Bunny here.

Notes On A Scandal by Zoe Heller

Notes On A Scandal is narrated by Barbara, a veteran teacher at a London comprehensive school, and a lonely spinster in her spare time. She has – shall we say – trouble making friends. Her story begins with the arrival of Sheba Hart, a new and apparently-naive (though very privileged) art teacher. Barbara intuits that they are potential BFFs, though Sheba barely seems to realise she exists at first. Slowly, Barbara ingratiates herself into Sheba’s life – first with lunches off campus, then dinners at her home. Unbeknownst to Barbara, however, Sheba is doing some ingratiating of her own, “falling in love” with her 15-year-old student Steven Connolly. Read my full review of Notes On A Scandal here.

Last month, the New York Times released a list of the best thriller books of the 21st century. It seems a bit early – the century is, after all, only just past a quarter of the way through – and the NYT seems to be playing fast and loose with their definition of “thriller books”… but it’s still interesting to look at nonetheless. I’ve gone through the list and added some of my own thoughts and reviews here.

50. None Of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

49. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

48. All The Colors Of The Dark by Chris Whitaker

47. The Push by Ashley Audrain

46. Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson

Before I Go To Sleep is a portrait of a marriage – one in very unusual and strained circumstances. It’s actually quite difficult to put yourself in the characters’ shoes, and ponder what it would be like to become a caregiver for your spouse, or (especially in the final act) what it would be like to become completely dependent on the person you married. I think it’s in that scary premise that Watson finds the horror: there’s no scary technology or monsters under the bed, and yet in the haunted domesticity of Christine and Ben’s life, you’ll find yourself afraid for her. Read my full review of Before I Go To Sleep here.

45. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

44. Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier

43. Lush Life by Richard Price

42. You by Caroline Kepnes

We’ve all Googled someone we’re interested in, haven’t we? It’s one of the great benefits of living in the 21st century, the ability to learn more about someone with a few nimble keystrokes. Well, You by Caroline Kepnes – a thriller novel published back in 2014 that went on to become an international best-seller and a must-watch TV adaptation – takes this idea to its (il)logical extreme. Read my full review of You here.

41. Tell No One by Harlan Coben

40. Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

If there really are infinite possible parallel universes, how do you know if the life you are living is your “real” life? Dark Matter is a mind-bending thriller book about all the possible paths our lives could take. A college professor, Jason Dessen, is kidnapped and asked whether he is happy with his life as it is. When he wakes, he finds himself living a completely different life – one with incredible professional success, but without his wife and child. Will he stay in the version of his life where his dreams have come true, or will he return to the life that felt like his for so long?

39. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

38. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

37. Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

36. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

If you’re not intrigued by The Silent Patient, I don’t know how to help you. You’re certainly the exception rather than the rule. It debuted in 2019 at #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List, and went on to win the Goodreads Choice Award (Mystery & Thriller). The story begins with a forensic psychotherapist, Theo, drawn to the case of a woman at a psychiatric facility called The Grove. She has not spoken in over six years. Theo finagles his way into a job there, convinced that he’s the only one who can reach her and find the real reason for her protracted silence. Read my full review of The Silent Patient here.

35. All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

34. The Likeness by Tana French

You ever hear the premise of a book that’s just so outrageous, you drop everything to pick up a copy? That’s what happened for me with The Likeness, a 2008 murder mystery by the reigning queen of Irish crime, Tana French. It begins in 2005, in Dublin, where detective Cassie Maddox is trying to find her balance after a major trauma on a previous case with the Dublin Murder Squad. Cassie gets a frantic call from her detective boyfriend, begging her to come out to a crime scene. A dog walker has discovered a girl’s dead body – sadly, nothing unusual about that. What is unusual, however, is the young woman looks exactly like Cassie. Yep! Folks, we’ve got ourselves a doppelgänger. Read my full review of The Likeness here.

33. The Witch Elm by Tana French

32. Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

31. Defending Jacob by William Landay

30. The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen

29. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

The Plot has a jaw-dropping, amazing, oh-my-I-must-read-this-immediately premise. I challenge any booklover or creative type not to immediately run out and grab a copy once they hear it: can’t be done! As per the blurb, it’s “a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it”. Who could possibly know that Jacob Finch Bonner stole the plot to his life-changing bestseller book from a dead student? Who would care? And, most importantly, what are they going to do with that information? Read my full review of The Plot here.

28. The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

27. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Big Little Lies isn’t a “literary” read, but it lives up to the hype. I was surprised at how dark it was, really, even though it managed to make me chuckle now and then. A New York Times book review said: “A seemingly fluffy book suddenly touches base with vicious reality”, which is spot on. There are laughs to be had, sure, but they’re ornaments on pretty heavy and disturbing subject matter. I hope everyone who picks this one up does so with eyes open. Read my full review of Big Little Lies here.

26. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

25. Winter’s Bone by David Woodrell

24. The Dry by Jane Harper

The Dry is set in Kiewarra, a fictional town five hours’ drive from Melbourne. It’s an El Niño summer, and severe drought has hit the town hard. A farmer, Luke Hadler, shot his wife and son in cold blood, before turning the gun on himself – or so it seems. Most of the townspeople are happy to assume that it was the last desperate act of a depressed man driven to the brink, but Luke’s parents think something more sinister might be afoot. After all, why would Luke leave his 13-month-old daughter unscathed? Read my full review of The Dry here.

23. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

22. The Constant Gardener by John le Carre

21. Room by Emma Donoghue

Sometimes a thriller book’s premise alone is enough to chill you to your core. Room, a 2010 novel by Emma Donoghue, is a story told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack, a boy who has spent his entire life held captive in a single locked room with his mother. It’s all he has ever known. This is no post-apocalyptic hide-out or agoraphobic folie à deux – they are both victims of a terrible crime (based on the real-life horrors of Josef Fritzl). Read my full review of Room here.

20. Broken Harbor by Tana French

19. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Sharp Objects follows Camille Preaker, a journalist for a small Chicago newspaper, as she’s drawn back to her hometown to report on the abduction and murder of two young girls. At first, Camille doesn’t seem particularly unusual – sure, she’s a bit of a drinker, and she clearly has some unresolved issues with her family, but who doesn’t? Gradually, as the events of this thriller unfold, you realise how dark she really is, and why those issues with her mother and her hometown might never be untangled. Read my full review of Sharp Objects here.

18. 11/22/63 by Stephen King

17. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

16. The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

15. Dare Me by Megan Abbott

14. We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Even though We Need To Talk About Kevin is fictional, its stark portrayal of a woman reeling after her son’s violent killing spree at his high-school has become a kind of cultural shorthand since its initial publication in 2003. A regretful mother resents her own child, and fears him despite his father’s insistence that he’s a “normal” boy. After he kills several of his classmates and staff at his school, she writes to her absent husband about what happened and where it all went wrong with Kevin. Read my full review of We Need To Talk About Kevin here.

13. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

12. The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

Every character in The Girl On The Train could be the “bad guy”; they’re all fucked up in profoundly disturbing ways, and yet they are all recognisable. Any one of them could be your friend or your partner or your neighbour or your family, which is really the scariest part of all. The whole way through, though, you need to bear in mind that your experience as a reader is filtered through the (very subjective) lens of an incredibly unreliable narrator. You’ve got to keep a close eye on the dates, too – even within chapters, the stories aren’t told chronologically. It’s very cleverly (deliberately) done to disorient the reader. Read my full review of The Girl On The Train here.

11. Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

10. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

9. Slow Horses by Mick Herron

8. Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

7. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

6. My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

As much as we all love a bit of mystery and intrigue, sometimes it’s nice to read a thriller book with the premise laid out completely in the title. My Sister, The Serial Killer gives you exactly what it says on the tin: the story of Korede and her sister, Ayoola, who has the unfortunate habit of killing her boyfriends. The story begins with Korede cleaning up the blood spatters of the third man that Ayoola has “dispatched”, and immediately you get the sense that this situation can’t continue indefinitely. Read my full review of My Sister, The Serial Killer here.

5. No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

4. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

3. In The Woods by Tana French

Back in 1984, three children disappeared in the woods (geddit?) near the Irish estate of Knocknaree. Several hours later, one of the children – Adam – was found in a state of catatonic shock, covered in blood, with no memory of what happened to him or his friends. Twenty years later, when In The Woods takes place, Adam (now going by Robert, to distance himself from his awful past) is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad, and finds himself investigating the death of a twelve-year-old girl in the very same woods where his friends disappeared. Read my full review of In The Woods here.

2. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

1. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl is a crime thriller/mystery novel by American writer, Gillian Flynn. It came on the crest of the wave of “psychological thrillers” that still hasn’t receded. In fact, given how many copies it sold (over two million in the first year alone), how long it spent on the best-seller lists, the extent to which it has permeated the popular consciousness, we might say that this was the typhoon that caused the wave to begin with. Read my full review of Gone Girl here.

5 Books I Think Should Have Been Included In NYT’s Best Thriller Books of the 21st Century

True Story by Kate Reed Petty

True Story is complex and clever. It’s also intense, scary, sad, insightful, nauseating and confronting, and yet it manages to be an enjoyable read in the sense that a boxing match is enjoyable to watch. If you can stomach the violence and fall-out, you get to witness the majesty of talent and strength play out before you. Read my full review of True Story here.

The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald

I really want to emphasise that The Cry isn’t just for thriller readers; anyone who likes ethical grey areas and/or the complexity of modern families will rip through it. It’s a dark, psychological thriller with a gripping moral dilemma, perfect for anyone who enjoys a story about good people doing bad things. Read my full review of The Cry here.

The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard

The Nothing Man is the perfect fiction book for fans of I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Catherine Ryan Howard even cites that specific book as inspiration in the Acknowledgements. If you’re looking for a book to give a true crime aficionado – or if you’re one yourself, looking to try something different – this is the one to go with. Read my full review of The Nothing Man here.

The Woman In The Library by Sulari Gentill

The Woman In The Library is a meta-fictional mystery-thriller, and a book-within-a-book, with two puzzles playing out on the page. This twisty and mischievous novel was a true delight to read. The big clang comes on page 132, and from there it’s a thrilling ride all the way to the finish. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. Read my full review of The Woman In The Library here.

One Of Those Mothers by Megan Nicol Reed

In One Of Those Mothers, the tight-knit middle class community of Point Heed, Aotearoa, unravels when a local father (name suppressed) is convicted of possessing child exploitation materials. Dual mysteries play out and entwine around each other: who’s the perv? What happened between Bridget and Lucy to destroy their lifelong friendship? It’s all unveiled tantalisingly slowly, and Reed tells the story masterfully. Read my full review of One Of Those Mothers here.