Fans pick 100 books like The Villa

I adore unreliable narrators—and here we have two, a pair of best friends on a dream backpacking vacation. Something terrible happens on their travels. Even worse, tragedy struck the last time they backpacked together. Worst luck ever? Or something more sinister?

I love the dynamics between this book’s flawed besties and the growing uncertainty about who can be trusted. This is one twisty read that’s deliciously creepy. It left me feeling lucky to have good friends in real life.

Okay, you've almost certainly heard of this one. You might even be thinking that The Husband's Secret is a more obvious choice for this list. But I'm including BLL anyway because I couldn't believe how enthralling it was (even though I've been a Liane Moriarty fan since The Hypnotist's Love Story).

Many of the entries on this list have depicted a marriage that looks perfect from the outside but is rotten within. This book inverts this formula, or at least complicates it—Celeste thinks her marriage is perfect (or is telling herself she thinks that), but it's obvious from the reader's outside perspective that her husband is an abuser.

There are many intriguing threads woven through this story (all coming together in a showdown so satisfying that I read it several times), but the scenes with Perry are the most impressive. They left me sick with fear.

I’m a huge sucker for stories involving teen girls and secrets—and no one handles this trope better than Tana French in this wildly atmospheric boarding school mystery.

A year after a boy’s found murdered at a secluded Irish school, a note appears on a bulletin board reading: “I know who killed him.” It’s soon clear that a lot of the girls know something. What though?

I love the dark academia vibe, the claustrophobia, and the girls, so close-knit and determined. This is a gorgeously written tale of friendship, loyalty, lies, and betrayal, just buzzing with witchy teen energy.

If you haven’t discovered Joshilyn Jackson, you’re in for a treat. Her Domestic Suspense novels are so sharp, cleverly plotted, and darkly funny.

It’s not old friends but new ones that wreak havoc in Never Have I Ever, as a glamorous “bad girl” newcomer joins the local book club—with ulterior motives.

This is a tale of the secrets people hope will stay hidden, manipulation, and below-the-surface danger, told with wry insights about human nature and crackling humor.

Gerald Asher is a wine writer who is celebrated for his range, his knowledge, his ability to see below the surface of things, and his compelling writing style. This book of essays about wine is one of my favourites, ranging as it does from wines with food, in which he goes in unexpected directions, to whether or not and how to decant wines, to drinking wine in Greece surrounded by the gods, to wines from Portugal and California and Oregon and Italy and France. He takes me to places I’ve never been and to wines I’ve never drunk, all with no effort on my part. Along the way, I learn and I enjoy. What a pleasurable book!

As a lover of fairytales, I love the premise of The Castle of Crossed Destinies and that tarot cards appear visually down the margins of the pages. Novelist Italo Calvino places us in two settings: a castle, and a tavern. Guests traveling through the woods arrive to discover they have lost their ability to speak so they use tarot cards to “show” their stories. The narrator translates those cards (reliably or unreliably—you decide). A tarot card grid appears for the stories in the Tavern of Crossed Destinies section of the book that lays out plot possibilities. I love the visual “chess” concept and that you can use tarot card layouts to plot tales, novels, or a series of poems. 

I’ve read many thrillers in my genre touted for their mind-blowing twists, but which have left me disappointed. The Boys lives up to its hype. Totally.  

Ethan is a husband who has an extreme fear of parenting. To help him overcome his fears, his wife Barb arranges for them to foster two brothers. Ethan takes to his parenting role so diligently that Barb has to take a breather from the marriage while Ethan takes the boys on a biking trip to Italy.  

It is here—a little more than halfway through the novel—that the reader learns the shocking truth about the boys. Nothing prepared me for this twist. At all. Or, for the revelations and resolution that followed—all of which made the twist totally plausible and comprehensible.  

This is a much-needed antidote to the navel-gazing tendencies of American criminal justice thought.

Reading contemporary treatments, you might almost be fooled into thinking that certain types of police controversies have a specifically American – or at least modern – origin. They don't. In fact, the peculiar challenges of policing and its inevitable discontents might even be universal.

Certainly, they were present at an early stage in medieval Italy, long before the first English "bobbies" ever dawned a uniform. Use-of-force controversies, weapons prohibitions, reluctant witnesses, hostile crowds, simmering beefs among local gangsters: it's all here. Roberts' medieval world so eerily resembles our own when it comes to law enforcement that one ends up surprised to encounter any differences at all.

Here's one, though: medieval town dwellers did not have cell phones with which to film the cops misdeeds. Instead, they hollered for notaries to scribble records on the spot.

Theoderic the Ostrogoth, arguably the greatest Gothic king, ruled over Italy for more than thirty years (493-526). Moorhead offers an insightful and detailed examination of how Theoderic succeeded in maintaining peace between Goths and Romans and extended his power and prestige, only for the Ostrogothic kingdom to collapse shortly after his death due to political and religious divisions and the Reconquest by the eastern emperor Justinian. Scholars still debate the extent of Theoderic’s own responsibility for the Ostrogothic decline, and as Moorhead observes the very policies which underlay Theoderic’s success also contributed to his kingdom’s vulnerability. I just wish that Moorhead had expanded his very brief comments on Theoderic’s remarkable legacy, which included appearing in the Nibelungenlied and as a symbol of German unification.

Oxford academic Dr. Roderick Bailey is an expert on the Special Operations Executive who made helpful comments to improve my first WW2 book. I love the little-known stories of Italian and British secret agents that populate this book, which is the official history of SOE’s undercover war against Mussolini's Italy. I enjoy tracing the strategic impact of relatively minor actions. Some efforts succeeded, many failed. There were the attempts to make common cause with the Sicilian Mafia. There was the agent paid and supplied by SOE who was really working for Italian Counter-Intelligence. And there was the SOE agent who parachuted into Lake Como, was immediately captured and expected execution, but survived to provide the secret radio link that enabled Italy to surrender and change sides.