Thursday, January 10, 2019

Five fully immersive novels of psychological suspense

Laura Sims's new novel is Looker.

At CrimeReads she tagged five fully immersive novels of psychological suspense, including:
The White City by Karolina Ramqvist

Ramqvist’s novel is quietly arresting from the start: “It was the end of winter. Under the sky that had always been there, now dark, the house still looked almost new. It had a sort of shine to it and was surrounded by nothing but silence and snow.” Inside this starkly beautiful, isolated landscape, in a once-grand, now-neglected and deeply mortgaged house, a woman is struggling to survive with her infant child after her partner, a high-rolling criminal, has died. I love everything about this book: the spare, finely honed language and atmospheric setting; the atypical focus on the criminal’s female partner, rather than the criminal himself; the realistic portrayal of motherhood’s comforts and demands; the protagonist’s piercing observations; and the escalating, realistic tension that drives the character to act as she never would have dreamed she could.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue