Thirteen top psychological thrillers with gobsmacking twists

Sarah Bonner lives in Sussex with her husband and very spoiled rescue dog. She’s worked in finance and project management for the last fifteen years, but the pandemic gave her the opportunity to revisit her teenage dream of writing. Her Perfect Twin is her debut novel and she’s brimming with ideas for more twisty psychological thrillers.

At CrimeReads Bonner tagged thirteen favorite psychological thrillers, including:

Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

Jen watches in horror as her teenage son kills a stranger in the street outside the family home. But the next morning, Jen wakes to find Todd is asleep in his room; the murder hasn’t yet happened. Every day she discovers she has jumped backwards again as she searches the past for the reason why her son committed such an act. Can she find the truth? And can she prevent the murder from ever happening?

Gillian McAllister’s newest novel is an absolute triumph. Not only does the author deploy her trademark twist after twist in a story full of compelling characters, but she also plays around with the narrative form and the very structure of time itself. I read this as I recovered from COVID, wondering if its brilliance was part of an elaborate fever dream. On a second (and more lucid!) reading, I can confirm that it is both ambitiously genius and a simply great story.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue