Friday, August 15, 2025

Ten top psychological thrillers with explosive family secrets

Claire Douglas is the Sunday Times number-one bestselling author of eleven stand-alone novels, including The Sisters, Local Girl Missing, Last Seen Alive, Do Not Disturb, Then She Vanishes, Just Like The Other Girls, The Couple at No. 9, The Girls Who Disappeared, The Woman Who Lied, and The Wrong Sister.

[Writers Read: Claire Douglas (December 2017)]

At The Strand Magazine she tagged ten "favourite psychological thrillers with explosive family secrets." One title on the list:
SHARP OBJECTS by Gillian Flynn.

This brilliantly twisty and creepy thriller is Gillian Flynn’s debut and my favourite of her books. It’s about Camille, a reporter sent back to Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover the case of a murdered girl and another who goes missing. When Camille returns to her childhood home to visit her parents it’s soon obvious why she wanted to leave her dysfunctional family in the first place. Camille is traumatised by her past and she struggles with returning to Wind Gap. As she starts investigating what happened to the missing girl and who the murderer might be, she realises it might all be linked to her own childhood.
Read about another thriller on the list.

Sharp Objects is among Allison Gunn's seven top horror novels set in small towns, Lucy Foley's six top stories of folk horror, Katherine Higgs-Coulthard's top six crime-in-the-family thrillers, Zach Vasquez's seven dark novels about motherhood, Christina Dalcher's seven crime books that challenge the idea of inherent female goodness, Nicole Trope's six domestic suspense novels where nothing is really ever what it seems, Heather Gudenkauf's ten great thrillers centered on psychology, and Peter Swanson's ten top thrillers that explore mental health.

--Marshal Zeringue