Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Five great psychological thrillers set in isolated places

Claire Douglas has worked as a journalist for fifteen years writing features for women’s magazines and national newspapers, but she’s dreamed of being a novelist since the age of seven. She finally got her wish after winning the Marie Claire Debut Novel Award, with her first novel, The Sisters. She lives in Bath with her husband and two children.

Douglas's new novel is Do Not Disturb.

At CrimeReads she tagged "five of [her] favorite psychological thrillers that use isolated locations to create that sense of menace and fear." One title on the list:
In A Dark Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

In this Agatha Christie-esque debut novel by the brilliant Ruth Ware, the main character, Nora, is invited to a hen party with a small group of friends, to a house in the middle of the woods during winter. So far so chilling, but when the snow storm cuts them off from the rest of the world, the sense of isolation ramps up several notches and with it the tension. Especially when strange things start to happen; unexplained footprints in the snow, no reception on their phones. And then somebody is killed. This is a claustrophobic and scary psychological thriller where you don’t know who, out of all the friends, including the main character, to trust.
Read about another entry on the list.

In A Dark Dark Wood is among Jody Gehrman's top seven novels that use weather to enhance the suspense.

--Marshal Zeringue