July is Crime Month here at Booktopia — a month-long celebration of crime fiction and edge-of-your-seat thrillers, as well as the readers who devour them. Today, queen of the domestic thriller Lisa Jewell (The Night She Disappeared) is on the blog to share some of her favourite books with us. Read on …
Her
by Harriet Lane
Nina recognises Emma on the street from 20 years ago and quickly brings her into her fold. But where does Nina remember Emma from, and why is she so keen to befriend her? Chilling with a horrifying sting in the tail, this is possibly one of the darkest psychological thrillers I have ever read, made all the more so by the tiny details upon which the character’s narratives twist and turn.
Buy it here
The Stopped Heart
by Julie Myerson
One night in the early 1900’s a man with violently red hair appears in front of a cottage during a storm, moves in and slowly tears the residents’ lives apart. In the modern narrative, a grieving couple move to the same cottage a hundred years later, trying to find peace in a world that has taken everything away from them. The two stories coexist side by side, joined here and there by echoes and shadows, the invisible filaments of two desperate families, twisting and untwisting across the chasm of time.
Buy it here
A Fatal Inversion
by Barbara Vine
In the long hot summer of 1976, a group of young people are camping out in sprawling, decadent Wyvis Hall hidden away from local villagers, and from the rest of the world, scavenging, stealing and selling the family heirlooms. It is dreamlike, bohemian, feral. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and child are discovered in the Hall’s animal cemetery. Which woman? Whose child? This book flips backwards and forward between the mid-eighties and the summer of 1976 as it unpeels the layers of a dark and shocking secret.
Buy it here
After You’d Gone
by Maggie O’Farrell
This was the novel that pushed me subtly away from writing family dramas and towards writing thrillers. Alice boards a train in London to visit her sisters in Scotland, but then she sees something in a mirror in Edinburgh that shocks her so badly that she returns to London immediately, where she steps in front of a car and ends up in coma. It is beautifully yet accessibly written and deals with the subject of grief in such an astute, touching and real way that I was on the verge of tears for most of the book.
Buy it here
The Hidden Girl
by Louise Millar
London urbanites Will and Hannah Riley have been waiting a long time to adopt. They have even bought a new house in the countryside, a huge detached manor house, the perfect home for their new family. Then it snows and with Will still in London during the week, overnight, Hannah finds herself cut off from the world in this tiny, isolated hamlet. By day she decorates the new house, waiting for a visit from the social worker who will be assigning them their baby. But by night there are strange noises in the house, footsteps overhead. And the neighbours are very, very weird. Chilling and thrilling in equal measure.
Buy it here
Sleep With Me
by Joanna Briscoe
This is the gripping story of a rather brittle young couple, newly engaged and living in Bloomsbury, whose lives are turned upside down by a strange girl they meet at a dinner party, called Sylvie. I love books where strangers appear, from stage left and subtly, imperceptibly infiltrate and sabotage normality.
Buy it here
The Collector
by John Fowles
As a young woman I always thought if I were ever to write a novel, it would be like this. Published in 1963, Fowles’ incendiary debut is the story of a psychopathic young man called Frederick who kidnaps the object of his warped affections, a young art student called Miranda and keeps her prisoner in his basement. Seminal and inspirational, the godfather of the genre in many ways.
Buy it here
The Last Thing To Burn
by Will Dean
Finally, on to my most recent crime favourite, this is the taut, breathless and shocking story of a young woman trafficked from Vietnam and kept prisoner deep in the Suffolk countryside by a psychopathic farmer called Lenn. The novel follows her attempt to escape with a baby and a broken ankle. It’s utterly spellbinding and quite traumatic.
Buy it here
Lisa Lisa Lisa
The Night She Disappeared
Midsummer 2017: teenage mum Tallulah heads out on a date, leaving her baby son at home with her mother, Kim. At 11pm she sends her mum a text message. At 4.30am Kim awakens to discover that Tallulah has not come home. Friends tell her that Tallulah was last seen heading to a pool party at a house in the woods nearby called Dark Place. Tallulah never returns.
2018: walking in the woods behind the boarding school where her boyfriend has just started as a head-teacher, Sophie sees a sign nailed to a fence. A sign that says: DIG HERE . . .
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