3 new twisty thrillers to read this summer
Take a stack of recent crime novels. Read the description of the book and the blurbs praising the writer. The word you are most likely to see is “twist.”
I have done this experiment many times. Today I picked up five books from my pile, and the first three met my criteria. Megan Miranda’s “You Belong Here” is “twisty … tense and atmospheric.” Delia Pitts’s “Death of an Ex” is a “twisting mystery.” And Belinda Bauer’s “The Impossible Thing” has a plot that “twists and turns.”
Why has the twist become such an urgent, seemingly necessary element in crime fiction? Is it because we are addicted to novelty, to the unexpected? Is it our damaged attention spans? What happens if a plot doesn’t twist?
Ideally, the twist captures a reader’s attention and toys with their allegiances. It is a careful harmonizing: A twist should be a bombshell, not a bomb. Readers need to both believe that the twist is within the scope of what is possible and not have come close to anticipating it.
Three new books are instructive about the twisty era in which we live and read:
We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough (Pine &Cedar, $28.99)
Emily Bennett, the heroine of “We Live Here Now,” is recuperating after a life-threatening bout of sepsis. She’s living quietly with her husband, Freddie, at Larkin Lodge, their stately house in the English countryside. Freddie goes back to London during the week, leaving Emily alone in the house.
Pinborough has constructed a satisfying modern gothic. The crux of a gothic is often a real estate problem: See Daphne du Maurier’s classic “Rebecca,” or A.J. Finn’s “The Woman in the Window.” Emily suspects Freddie is having an affair and that someone — or something — is living in the house with her. When she catches her husband sneaking to the bathroom to send a text, the seeds of her suspicion bloom into conviction.
Pinborough never loses her footing, ratcheting up Emily’s suspicions and paranoia without falling into cliché.
Don’t Open Your Eyes By Liv Constantine (Bantam, $30)
Constantine’s new thriller is the tale of Annabelle, a woman with disturbing dreams. The twist — one of them — is that they start coming true. (Constantine is the pen name of sisters Lynne Constantine and Valerie Constantine.)
“Don’t Open Your Eyes” features classic unreliable characters. Annabelle might be a Cassandra whose dreams are prophecies, or she might be descending into insanity. She also suspects that her husband might be unfaithful, and it makes emotional sense when Annabelle starts dreaming he’s dead.
But when she starts dreaming that her two daughters are also dead, and parts of her dreams appear in her waking life, Annabelle is bewildered and terrified.
Both Annabelle and Pinborough’s Emily are absorbing protagonists: The reader wants them to wake up in a world where they feel confident in reality again, but the constant anticipation of another twist keeps us in suspense.
Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza (Dutton, $19)
Piazza’s novel mines the rich world of momfluencers, and specifically tradwives, performative proponents of an idyllic conservative vision of family life and wifely behavior. The protagonist, Lizzie, is a reporter for a failing magazine and the harried mother of young children. She’s given an important assignment to profile Rebecca Sommers, a momfluencer whose brand is freshly baked muffins and freshly baked children.
Lizzie and Rebecca, then known as Bex, were best friends in college, but Bex ghosted Lizzie and they lost touch. Now Bex has resurfaced as the wife of a handsome and powerful man, and they have a perfect Instagrammable life, replete with posts showing delicate nests of hen’s eggs and tender moments of maternal love on their sprawling ranch. Bex knows that her audience “gets jazzed” watching her hang laundry and make beds, and she gives them what they crave.
Bex invites Lizzie to a momfluencers’ conference at a ritzy resort. But after a night of reconciliation and confidences, Bex disappears and her husband’s dead body surfaces. Rebecca has problems not documented on her social media accounts. Lizzie is propelled into an investigation motivated in part by sentiment and nostalgia, and in part by her ambition.
Piazza cleverly infuses the novel with a critique of the hopeless ideal of tradwives, with their carefully tousled children, adorable goats and gorgeous cakes.
