The best psychological thrillers with killer twists you will not see coming

Little Secrets is both brilliantly written and terrifying, making it one of my all-time favorite psychological thrillers. Eighteen months after Marin’s young son, Sebastian, was kidnapped as she shopped with him at a crowded Seattle market, both Marin and her marriage are hanging on by a thread. Desperate for answers, she hires a PI to help locate additional clues as to what happened to her son. As the secrets begin unraveling, the twists reveal themselves. Jennifer Hillier’s clean writing style and relatable characters drew me in, but the high tension and off-the-charts creep-factor kept me tearing through the pages all the way until the shocking ending.

I’m a sucker for domestic mysteries, especially those with plenty of twists and turns. The Couple Next Door checks all the boxes for a gripping psychological thriller, one that I tore through in only two sittings. Anne and Marco, parents of one-year-old, Cora, attend a dinner party at the row house next door. Their babysitter suddenly cancelled just before the outing, so they bring their baby monitor to the dinner and take turns checking on Cora every thirty minutes as she sleeps in her crib. All goes well until Anne’s final check of the night, when she finds the crib empty, and Cora missing. But who could have taken her? I love that everyone had a secret to hide in this deliciously mysterious tale, which reveals plenty of dark family secrets and delivers a bombshell ending. 

I love books that make me question what I would do in a similar situation. As an author, I especially related to the moral dilemmas faced by the main character of this page-turner. The Plot transports the reader into the shoes of Jacob Finch Bonner, a struggling writer and MFA professor who steals the plot of the century from one of his former students, Evan, who has since died. Jacob’s newly published novel quickly becomes a massively successful bestseller. But someone knows what Jacob has done and is threatening to expose him. Living in a state of paranoia, Jacob sets out to discover who knows his dark secret, and where the plot from Evan’s story really originated. Eek! I’m still thinking about this one many months after reading it!

I love all of Mary Kubica’s books because of her straightforward writing style and the Chicago-area settings. In Local Woman Missing, a peaceful, suburban neighborhood transforms into a harrowing place where people go missing and we question how well we really know our neighbors. Told from multiple points of view and timelines, the twists abound as the reader uncovers what happened to the missing women and girl. The ending was chilling, and I didn’t see it coming, which is exactly what I want from a psychological thriller. 

This was the first Ruth Ware book I read, and it was the book that made me want to become a psychological thriller author. It asks the question, what if your friends aren’t really your friends? A dark question, indeed, especially when the main character believes someone in her friend group is out to kill her. In A Dark, Dark Wood transports the reader to a remote house in the woods where the main character, Nora, meets up with a group of people to celebrate the impending wedding of a friend, Clare, who she hasn’t seen in ten years. It was odd that Clare invited her, wasn’t it? The tension between the guests is off the charts and, as secrets are exposed, things take an even more sinister turn.