Top Psychological Thrillers Have a Feminine Face

Best-selling mystery-thrillers like Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies have won fans and movie renditions because of cleverly deceptive psychological plotting. There's an interesting trend in these novels: To create their surprise twists, the authors rely on the unreliable narration of troubled female protagonists and a claustrophobic domesticity that is distinctly feminine. Forensic evidence, genius detectives, and serial killer foes do not power these story lines. Instead, they turn inward to the dark places of the female psyche and relationships, and maybe it is precisely because of today's #MeToo female empowerment and growing emancipation from female stereotypes (damsel in distress, romantic ingenue, wise-old-lady sleuth) that this female psychological warping has come out of the shadows in the mystery world. If you are a reader who grabs a book when the blurb says "if you loved The Girl on the Train...," check out Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll, a debut novel inspired by Knoll's own life, about a magazine editor forced to unearth her teenage memory of a traumatic assault and confront the mysteries in her own psyche. You may also like What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman, which starts when a woman taken in by the police after a hit-and-run car accident claims to be the victim of a famous missing person's case from decades earlier. Lippman approaches the cold case police procedural in an inventive way that explores the deeper mysteries of human nature. With the sexual predation scandals of women's gymnastics in the news, there's something very topical about You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott, in which the sudden death of a young man in a car accident plunges a tight community of women gymnasts and their parents and coaches into crisis. For more options, see https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/books-like-girl-on-the-train-mysteries-thrillers

Mysteries From the Viewpoint of a Witness

Most murder mysteries focus on the victim, the killer and the sleuth (detective, PI, prosecutor, etc.). But there is a third group of essential characters: the witnesses. Authors present witnesses and their narratives to the readers for evaluation based on the same elements used by legal teams. First, expertise and experience are key to witness credibility, ranging from specialized education to ordinary familiarity. Witnesses are also evaluated in terms of consistency, meaning both consistent telling of his or her story by the witness and consistency with input from other witnesses. A certain level of detail makes a witness more believable, too--as long as details don't vary with each telling. Readers (and jurors) also judge reliability by witness "demeanor," or a gut "feel" evoked by dress, body language, speaking style, and assumptions (perhaps wrong) about social, racial or ethnic background. Finally, perceived "neutrality" counts in how much weight readers are going to give to a witness; readers are more likely to suspect self-serving bias if the witness has a clear stake in the outcome, such as financial gain or a personal relationship. Witnesses don't have to be supporting cast members in mystery fiction. Authors can choose to unfold a story from the viewpoint of a witness for a number of good reasons: to mislead with partial or unreliable narration, to hide or highlight the reasoning of the detective, or to create empathy and emotional tension. A recent example of this is The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, in which the main character Rachel witnesses a shocking scene involving a couple she has observed during her daily train commute past their neighborhood, but her emotional problems, drinking and personal bias cause the police (and the reader) to question her reliability as a narrator. Another example where witnesses take center stage is Agatha Christie's Murder in Retrospect, in which Hercule Poirot solves the 16-year-old murder of a philandering painter, for which his wife was convicted, based solely on narratives of five witnesses. If you want a witness protagonist plus romance, check out The Witness by Nora Roberts, about a young woman who flees after witnessing a Russian mob killing and emerges years later in a small Ozarks town as a quirky freelance programmer protected by high-tech security systems, guard dog and firearms--and so she naturally attracts the sexy local police chief! Unfortunately, fictional justice does not necessarily mimic reality in terms of credible witnesses. Check out these 10 famous lying witnesses, and the miscarriages of justice that resulted from their false testimony: http://listverse.com/2015/08/04/10-people-who-brazenly-lied-on-the-witness-stand/

Intriguing Mystery Plot Twists, Fictional and Real

Mystery lovers, by their nature, are lovers of the plot twist. Just a few of my favorites with surprise twists include Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, In the Woods by Tana French, Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton, and We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Of course, the great Agatha Christie has multiple entries, such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Notice how often the "unreliable narrator" is key to the surprise twist, by the way. Sometimes fact is even more astounding than fiction, however. Just check out Listverse.com's post about 10 real-life mysteries solved by incredible plot twists. For example, there's seven-year-old Maria Ridulph's 1957 murder solved by a "murder will out" twist 54 years later. Although 17-year-old neighbor John Tessier was suspected of Ridulph's murder at the time, he had an iron-clad alibi: He had taken a train trip on the day the child disappeared. The police reopened the case in 1994 after a deathbed statement by Tessier's mother, but the alibi had them stumped--until one of Tessier's ex-girlfriends helpfully provided an old framed photograph. Investigators found the 1957 train ticket hidden inside, unstamped because Tessier had never used it to take the trip. Tessier was finally charged with murder in 2011. Science, not luck, played the key role in another seemingly insoluble murder. After a 13-year-old girl was found stabbed to death in 2011 in Italy, police took 15,000 DNA tests to compare with DNA samples found at the murder scene. One man's near-match led to testing of his family, including a long-dead uncle and the uncle's children--without an exact match. Police then learned the dead uncle had been a very active womanizer, and 500 women were investigated. Police finally found a married woman whose twins turned out to be the secret offspring of the dead uncle. One of the twins was a match for the killer's DNA, and he was charged with murder in 2014. For more real-life twists, read http://listverse.com/2015/03/25/10-mysteries-resolved-by-unbelievable-surprise-twists/.

Best-Seller Mysteries for Your Summer Reading

It's time to gather up mystery fare for the long, lazy days of summer. If you are a fan of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, you'll like two new best sellers. For those attracted to mean-girl protagonists, try Jessica Knoll's The Luckiest Girl Alive. Ani FaNelli has reinvented herself as a New York magazine writer, boasting a wealthy fiancé and a brand-name wardrobe, but the past threatens her perfect life when she agrees to participate in a documentary about a long-ago shooting at her fancy private high school. If twists by an unreliable narrator were your Gone Girl turn-on, then The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is your English cup of tea. Protagonist Rachel is a boozy, fantasizing mess who has been fired from her job but structures her days by continuing her London train commute, a trip that conveniently allows her to spy on the street where her ex-husband and his new wife live. She fantasizes about the street's other inhabitants, including a young couple, and when the young woman goes missing, Rachel injects herself into the police inquiry and the lives of the missing woman's husband and her own ex-husband. Of course, there are many well-known writers on the best-seller list this summer--James Patterson, David Balducci, John Sanford, etc.--but if you're tired of urban crime detectives, try these alternatives. First, how about a trip to Wyoming's high plains to meet Craig Johnson's Sheriff Walt Longmire? In Cold Bones, Longmire investigates whether a local Cheyenne man's murder is related to valuable dinosaur bones unearthed on his property. Another alternative detective is "enigmatologist" Jeremy Logan in Lincoln Child's The Forgotten Room. Logan is called in by a prestigious think tank to investigate the suicide of a respected doctor following suddenly bizarre behavior and, in the organization's sprawling mansion, discovers a secret room full of old equipment for mysterious experiments. Finally, Stephen King's 2015 Edgar Award-winning Mr. Mercedes plays with the trappings of the hard-boiled detective story but transforms it with unlikely heroes, including a nervous 43-year-old spinster, who take on the unsolved murder of 23 people run down by a stolen car and then race to prevent the crazed killer from more deadly mayhem. For more options: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Mystery-Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/books/18