Here are 94 books that I Found You fans have personally recommended if you like
I Found You.
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I’ve been a stay-at-home mom and author for the past decade, and during that time, I went through the stillbirth of my second baby. Grief taught me a lot about compassion, including the importance of being able to see the nuance of difficult subject matters. I learned it’s easy to theorize what to do in a situation until you're in that situation. For that reason, I love books in all sorts of genres that are layered with characters’ past griefs, impossible scenarios, and tensions regarding the choices they make. I picked five of my favorite books with a heart-ripping plot that sparks interesting discussion and leaves readers pondering, "What would I have done?"
This book was a very bingeable read. I got caught up in the mystery of Hannah’s missing husband, and I also loved the layers of complicated family relationships shown with her stepdaughter.
I’m a sucker for the “he isn’t who he said he was” storyline, and this book masters that through Hannah’s husband, Owen. The entire story is weaved with surprises and plot twists, including the impossible choice Hannah faces at the end.
* SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SERIES STARRING JULIA ROBERTS *
'Brilliant. Pacy tense and twisty' - LISA HALL
'I adored this beautifully written thriller' - JO SPAIN
IT WAS THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME: PROTECT HER
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his new wife, Hannah: protect her. Hannah knows exactly who Owen needs her to protect - his sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. And who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As her increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, his boss…
Complex relationships have been the heart of my career. I have a BA in sexual anthropology from Concordia University in Montréal and a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. My debut novel, Weekend Friends, was published by Post Hill Press in 2023. My nonfiction book, Sex Drive: In Pursuit of Female Desire, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2012. Themes I like writing about include friendship, desire, conflict, healing, and love. I have published short stories and poetry and have written for publications such as the Huffington Post and Daily Life. I appear on TV and give talks, including a TEDx talk. My work has been featured in a National Geographic documentary.
Oh, Celeste Ng is a terrific writer. The story follows Mia and her daughter, Pearl—enigmatic newcomers to town—whose lives become entangled with Mrs. Richardson and her seemingly perfect family. The relationships between the mothers and their teenage children ignite a firestorm of intrigue. I love Ng's nuanced critique of female friendship.
"Witty, wise, and tender. It's a marvel." -Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train and A Slow Fire Burning
"To say I love this book is an understatement. It's a deep psychological mystery about the power of motherhood, the intensity of teenage love, and the danger of perfection. It moved me to tears." -Reese Witherspoon
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Our Missing Hearts comes a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their…
The first books I loved were Gothic classics like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, because of their isolated settings and secretive characters. When I first started writing, it was always stories about communities–the first novel I wrote featured a retirement village and a circus. Maybe that’s because I love observing communities in everyday life, like local pubs in which everybody has their place. When domestic suspense novels really took off, I started devouring crime books with close-knit settings and soon was writing them, too. I love the claustrophobia, the backstories, the landscape, the web of relationships. It can be done in so many different and brilliant ways.
To be honest, I could have picked multiple books by Lisa Jewell. She’s my favorite thriller writer, and many of her books use close-knit communities to set up mysteries in which I constantly change my mind about who I can trust. Exactly what I love about domestic noir!
In this book, the setting is a picturesque village in the Surrey Hills, where teenage parents Tallulah and Zach head out on a date to the local pub and never come home. There are two aspects of the seemingly idyllic community that really sucked me in: a mysterious mansion just outside the village known as Dark Place and a boarding school with its own long-kept secrets. Jewell uses the setting not only to heighten the sense of mystery–there are secret tunnels, woods where bad things happen, clues in old paintings, all the good stuff!–but also to explore themes of class, sexuality, and…
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone comes “her best thriller yet” (Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author) about a young couple’s disappearance on a gorgeous summer night, and the mother who will never give up trying to find them.
On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend.
One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the…
From USA Today bestselling author Peggy Webb comes a page-turning thriller.
It’s midnight in the Deep South where innocence and evil walk hand in hand. Every waking moment Jena Dahl re-lives the day the plane went down, plunging her husband and her little girl to their deaths. She was on…
I bought a bookstore when I was twenty-five, knowing nothing about business but knowing I loved books. It was the happiest I’ve ever been, professionally, and also the most broke. At some point, I came to my senses, sold my store, and got a job working in a library. I’m a library director now, and I don’t get to recommend books as much as I used to when I didn’t have to do things like think about the budget and remove dead mice from the cellar. Still, I get to work around books, and I overhear and occasionally insert myself into a fair number of book-related conversations.
Talk about a complicated mother-daughter relationship! Almost as soon as her daughter is born, Blythe suspects something is…off. And no kidding, is it ever? This book takes the idea of not being able to connect with your kid to a whole other, really terrifying level.
What I particularly love about this book is how much it challenges the idea of who is in charge in the mother-daughter relationship, and what it means if your kid is really, truly, bad. This book actually made me gasp. The title refers to the central incident of the book, but I like it because the book also pushes against all kinds of societal norms.
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | A New York Times bestseller!
"Utterly addictive." -Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
"Hooks you from the very first page and will have you racing to get to the end."-Good Morning America
A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family-and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for-and everything she feared
Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.
My fascination with things that go bump in the night probably stems from having read too many scary books in my younger years, when I devoured anything that made me want to hide under the blankets. My love of reading followed me into college, where I earned a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and later a law degree from DePaul University in Chicago. My passion for reading—and, later, writing—psychological thrillers remained. Today, I write full-time and have five psychological thriller and suspense novels published with Bookouture–Hachette UK, including several that have made it into the Top 100 Books in the Amazon US, UK, and AU Kindle stores!
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.
"Unflinching and unforgettable. Little Secrets has everything you want in a thriller" —Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Lock Every Door
Overwhelmed by tragedy, a woman desperately tries to save her marriage in award-winning author Jennifer Hillier's Little Secrets, a riveting novel of psychological suspense.
All it takes to unravel a life is one little secret...
Marin had the perfect life. Married to her college sweetheart, she owns a chain of upscale hair salons, and Derek runs his own company. They're admired in their community and are a loving family—until their world falls apart the day…
Of all of the jobs I’ve had in my lifetime (including writer!) no other job holds more importance than being a mom. These books not only appealed to me as a writer, but stirred something deep in me as a mother. These books play on every mother’s fears and insecurity. And, they made me view motherhood from a different perspective, asking, could I survive that? Would I have handled that differently? But mostly these books stuck with me long after I finished the last page, taught me to judge less, and grow my compassion muscle. These moms are forced to survive the unthinkable and emerge on the other side stronger. As strong as a mother.
Switching gears from the Domestic Suspense genre, I’d like to recommend a historical fiction gem. It’s been a while since I finished this first book in a series, but this story – and the mother of all mothers, Jeanie – has stuck with me. Her story is a constant reminder that womankind of the 1800s was made of steel and I’m not sure I would’ve survived back then. Jeanie’s life quickly turns from wealthy and having an esteemed reputation to losing it all. She’s then forced to follow her husband’s dreams of prairie life where Jeanie is forced to live off the land and faces the harshest of conditions, natural disasters, and the worst tragedy a mother can experience. (sidenote: follow this author on TikTok where she reads the real letters from Jeanie!)
"Gripping historical fiction—A tale of two women finding meaning behind all that went wrong in their lives. A timeless tale of redemption with the best plot-twist at the end I've seen in a long, long time. Can't wait for book two!" New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Melissa Foster
Katherine wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't found the letter...
In the summer of 1905 Katherine Arthur's mother arrives on her doorstep, dying, forcing her to relive a past she wanted to forget. When Katherine was young, the Arthur family had been affluent city dwellers until shame sent…
The Blue Prussian is a spellbinding story told by Blake O’Brien, a beautiful, young executive with a globetrotting career. Blake returns to her native Manhattan from San Francisco after escaping—or so she thinks—her marriage to a dashing man who turned out to be a prince of darkness. She had been…
I’m still trying to figure out who I am. I’ve made films, I’ve written fiction, I’ve been in a punk band, and now I’m in law school. I’ve bopped around to different interests my whole life and never quite felt like I fit in anywhere, maybe because I grew up a part Puerto Rican kid in Kentucky. I don’t know. All I know is I’ve been a reader all this time, and I think because I’ve always found my own identity elusive, the mysteries and thrillers I gravitate towards are ones with characters that aren’t so easy to pin down.
A stranger approaches Adam Price and tells him that Adam’s wife faked her most recent pregnancy and miscarriage. But as Adam presses for more answers, the stranger won’t tell him anything else, like how he knows this, why he’s telling him, or maybe more importantly, who he even is.
The stranger’s revelation is unsettling, but what I found the most disturbing was how creepy it is to have someone else know so much about you while refusing to divulge anything about themselves.
A secret destroys a man’s perfect life and sends him on a collision course with a deadly conspiracy in this shocking thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Harlan Coben.
The Stranger appears out of nowhere, perhaps in a bar, or a parking lot, or at the grocery store. Their identity is unknown. Their motives are unclear. Their information is undeniable. Then they whisper a few words in your ear and disappear, leaving you picking up the pieces of your shattered world...
Adam Price has a lot to lose: a comfortable marriage to a…
I’m still trying to figure out who I am. I’ve made films, I’ve written fiction, I’ve been in a punk band, and now I’m in law school. I’ve bopped around to different interests my whole life and never quite felt like I fit in anywhere, maybe because I grew up a part Puerto Rican kid in Kentucky. I don’t know. All I know is I’ve been a reader all this time, and I think because I’ve always found my own identity elusive, the mysteries and thrillers I gravitate towards are ones with characters that aren’t so easy to pin down.
Pinky fell into becoming a private investigator, but it’s a perfect fit for her personality.
She’s naturally curious. And skeptical. But now, even though she has an actual assignment she needs to work on, she’s spending her time investigating the guy who moved in next door. But his identity is impossible to pin down.
My favorite part is when Pinky gets caught following her weird neighbor. He introduces himself as Clarence, which is strikingly similar to Pinky’s real name, Clarice. It’s like he’s saying no matter how hard you try, you’ll never find out anything about me, but I know everything about you. I had to keep reading just to try to figure out who this guy was and what he was up to.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent and The Last Trial returns with a riveting legal thriller in which a reckless private detective is embroiled in a fraught police scandal.
For as long as Lucia Gomez has been the police chief in the city of Highland Isle, near Kindle County, she has known that any woman in law enforcement must walk a precarious line between authority and camaraderie to gain respect. She has maintained a spotless reputation—until now. Three male police officers have accused her of soliciting sex in exchange for promotions to higher ranks. With few…
I’m often asked: “Are you a musician? You mustbe, in order to write so beautifully and convincingly, through the eyes of a musician!” Actually, I’m what’s known as a “serious amateur”—which means that I study the piano “seriously” but not professionally, purely for the love of it. In fact, my understanding of the piano deepened tremendously as I worked on this book, as if my protagonist required that of me, in order to bring her to life the way she needed. The piano has become more and more vital to me, as a writer, because it allows me to explore and express in ways that don’t depend on words.
In Everything You Are, Braden is a cellist who has lost the use of his hands—in his case, through a tragic twist of fate. Enter Ophelia, granddaughter of the man who sold Branden his cello and made Ophelia swear that he will always play it. Author Kerry Anne King weaves a magical spell around these two characters as, together, they find their way to forgiveness. This is a story full of twists and turns, culminating in a beautiful ending that depicts the healing power of music.
From the bestselling author of Whisper Me This comes a haunting and lyrical novel about the promises we make and the forgiveness we need when we break them.
One tragic twist of fate destroyed Braden Healey's hands, his musical career, and his family. Now, unable to play, adrift in an alcoholic daze, and with only fragmented memories of his past, Braden wants desperately to escape the darkness of the last eleven years.
When his ex-wife and son are killed in a car accident, Braden returns home, hoping to forge a relationship with his troubled seventeen-year-old daughter, Allie. But how can…
If you’re intrigued by the psychology of relationships this is the novel for you.
Described as a modern-day Rebecca, this is a story of a bereaved man’s obsession with his deceased married lover, Michelle. Determined to find out all he can about Michelle’s life when she wasn’t with him,…
Ever since great-grandma told me she envied me, being born when women could choose any profession, I developed a deep respect for the women throughout history who have held unconventional roles. I am drawn to books featuring powerful women characters who show a zeal for making their mark on the world in roles like surveyors, ranchers, telephone operators, historians, horse trainers, and more, long before their choices became socially acceptable. As a woman software engineer (and now part-time author), I’ve gained an appreciation for all the women who paved the way for the modern woman.
In the western territories in 1870, very few authors choose a woman rancher as the heroine. But this author did. She built a strong female rancher full of personality that embodied the complexities of a real woman. I found Cheyenne very relatable. Sometimes she struggled with the balance of being tough and feeling emotion—just like I do in my technology career. I loved experiencing the danger, mayhem, and even the sweet romance right along with Cheyenne. This book has a permanent home in my library, along with the entire series. I loved it that much.
Falcon Hunt awakens without a past, or at least not one he can recall. He's got brothers he can't remember, and he's interested in the prettiest woman in the area, Cheyenne. Only trouble is, a few flashes of memory make Falcon wonder if he's already married. He can't imagine abandoning a wife. But his pa did just that--twice. When Falcon claims his inheritance in the West, Cheyenne is cut out of the ranch she was raised on, leaving her bitter and angry. And then Falcon kisses her, adding confusion and attraction to the mix.
