Six top crime-in-the-family thrillers

Katherine Higgs-Coulthard became a writer on the limb of a Sycamore tree when she was in elementary school. Since then she’s written in abandoned buildings, cemeteries, parks, and even on a tall ship, but her favorite place to write has always been the woods. Higgs-Coulthard graduated from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor's in education and earned a master's degree from Indiana University, before completing her doctorate in Education through Northeastern University. She has taught kindergarten, third, and fifth grades. Now she trains teachers at Saint Mary’s College and offers writing camps and classes for children and teens through Michiana Writers’ Center.

Higgs-Coulthard's new novel is Junkyard Dogs.

At CrimeReads she tagged six favorite crime-in-the-family thrillers, including:

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Most people know Gillian Flynn from her bestseller-turned-movie, Gone Girl. My favorite of Flynn’s works is still Sharp Objects because its unflinching take family dysfunction. When reporter Camille Preaker returns home to investigate the case of a missing girl, she finds herself right back in the drama of the family she’d moved across the country to escape. As she follows the clues to uncover what happened to the missing girl, she discovers terrifying connections to her own past. Although the language and tone are raw and explicit, they perfectly capture Camille’s disillusionment with the world and men in particular. Bonus—the book was made into a Netflix series featuring Amy Adams!

Read about another entry on the list.

Sharp Objects is among 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