100 books like The Secret Keeper

No one does dialogue and atmospheric tension like Tana French. Faithful Place is my favorite of hers.

I felt like the characters were so alive that I could hear their voices in my head long after I had closed the book. This story is rife with a gritty, urban Irish atmosphere and thick with familial tension. French does a cross between literary fiction and procedural that is devastating, at times quite dark, and yet ringing with hope—one of my favorite qualities in a mystery.

Best read on a dark, rainy afternoon with a mug of rich coffee—or a Guinness. 

Louise Penny has hooked me again with another great installment in the Inspector Gamache series. I was so excited when I opened the book and found I would be returning to Three Pines for a new murder and an old story line Penny has been dangling in front of me since book one.

Both are resolved in this book (I think, but you never know) and the end is more than satisfying. There's still a lot of unfinished business in that little town and this incredible cast of characters just keeps me coming back for more. Moreover, (I remind my husband every time I start a new book in the series), I would run away with Armand Gamache if given even the slightest chance. 

Wow! Wowie! To be honest, I am not someone who ever knows the ending of a thriller. I guess whatever part of the brain decides if you'll be good at solving mysteries, I don't have it! And every time I thought I knew where Gillian was leading me, the reader, I was always very wrong.

I really loved the powerful message of the strength of mothers throughout this book. I liked that this was time travel, but not so complicated that I couldn't follow it. I loved how this book explored the idea of "what if" and second chances in a really unique and compelling way. It was absorbing and fast-paced, and it definitely went down easy for me.

I love mysteries that play with form and narration. Malice was published in 1996 by Keigo Higashino and it’s unlike any mystery that I’ve ever read.

There are multiple stories being told at different levels and I loved the way the puzzle unravels. It’s a locked room mystery set in Tokyo that midway through the narrative switches from being about who the murderer is to why they did it. The atmosphere is chilling and almost sterile, like a flickering fluorescent light.

Best read on a redeye flight with a web of city lights spread out beneath you—or on a commuter train to work between sips of black coffee. 

This book made me laugh and cry in equal measure. Laurie Frankel writes about motherhood and families with such wit, charm, and frankness that I always feel like I’m being invited right into her characters’ lives, being asked to pull up a chair at their kitchen table. 

Through multiple perspectives and dual timelines, the story dives deep into the question of whether it’s genetics or dedication or love—or some complicated mix of all three—that makes someone a mother. I loved Frankel’s expansive perspective on the meaning of family, and the way she offers examples of biological moms, adoptive moms, and moms making unexpected choices, but all doing their best.  

I liked this story with two women protagonists because of its drama. The book had me mesmerized from beginning to end. One reason may be that I listened to the audiobook with the actress Rosamund Pike as narrator. She knew how to portray all the accents, from the (male) aristocrat Lucas Romer to the young woman spy Eva Delectorskaya.

I liked the dual timeline, with Eva’s adult daughter learning about her mother’s shocking hidden past as it is slowly revealed. I like books about mother/daughter relationships, and this is one of the better ones in that regard. But what kept me interested above all was the slow unfolding of the information and Eva’s haunted life. 

Miss Austen is Cassandra, sister of the more famous Jane, who takes centre stage in this story, though Jane is there, too, as the beloved missed sister, not the novelist. The year is 1840, Jane has been dead for twenty years, Cassandra is in her sixties and though frail is on a quest to find some missing letters which may reveal secrets about Jane and Cassandra which must not be known. It’s a mystery and we want to know if Cassandra will find those letters, but it is also a touching portrait of sisterly devotion. Cassandra makes an admirable heroine, determined and resourceful despite her frailty. It also tells much about the way in which spinsters, usually ignored by society, have a rich and complex inner life.

It’s been years since I first read Crossing Oceans and it has stuck with me, its message so moving, so challenging, so compelling, that I can’t forget it.

I read this book through tears, hating the choice that the character made because I doubted it was the one I would have made in her place. Yet, it was the Christ-like choice. This novel challenged me to be more like Jesus and to receive a love from Him that I didn’t have in and of myself. 

This novel achieves something that, as a writer, I think is one of the hardest things to pull off: tackling troubling, emotionally fraught material yet finding moments to make readers laugh out loud. The novel’s protagonist, Alex, has plenty of challenges to deal with: the loss of her mother to an apparent drug overdose, a difficult relationship with her can’t-seem-to-grow-up brother, and an uncertain reconnection with an old flame. Through Alex, Michalski manages to both confront these challenges and find humor in them. As I read the book and thought of the difficulties in my own life, I considered how I needed to take a page from this character’s playbook. Another element that leavens the novel’s heavier material is a plot thread that will delight rom-com enthusiasts.

I’ve just reread the opening of Our Endless Numbered Days and whoosh – I’m back in the story, with so many questions, prime among them why the narrator’s father – the liar, the north London survivalist – is removed from all photographs but this last, hidden one that she cuts and conceals under her breast.

Fuller’s story is a page-turner in all the best ways, going back in time to follow nine-year-old Peggy and her father as they run from their family home to a remote cabin in a European forest and a life of barely surviving despite all his plans.

Why? Who is the strange man on the mountain? And how does she get back home? Maybe that isolated mountain hut wasn’t so idyllic after all?