Six titles which aren’t mysteries but are full of suspense

Claire Fuller was born in Oxfordshire, England, and has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester.

She has written four novels: Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; and Unsettled Ground.

"Sometimes it’s easy to slot a book into a category or genre: romance, crime, or indeed, mystery. But there are lots of novels which are too slippery for that," Fuller writes at CrimeReads. "They have plenty of suspense and often a good dose of secrets and the unexplained to propel the story forward, even though their premise is not built around a central mystery which follows a trail to a satisfying conclusion."

At CrimeReads she tagged "six recommended novels which aren’t mysteries but are full of suspense," including:

The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna

Duro is an odd-job man who is hired to help renovate The Blue House on the edge of a Croatian village after the house has been bought by Laura, an English woman there for the summer with her two teenage children. The family is unaware of the history of the house, the land and the people, and as Duro helps them reveal a mosaic of a bird on the front of The Blue House, what happened to the previous occupant—Duro’s first love—is also slowly revealed to the reader in flashbacks. Forna writes about the lasting effects of civil war in a such understated way that the suspense gradually creeps up on the reader until we have to know what happened.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue