Six top friends-to-frenemies thrillers

Leah Konen is the author of Keep Your Friends Close, You Should Have Told Me, The Perfect Escape, All the Broken People, and several young adult novels, including Love and Other Train Wrecks and The Romantics.

Her books have been featured in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, Reader’s Digest and The NY Post, among others.

Konen lives in Brooklyn and Saugerties, New York, with her husband; their daughters, Eleanor and Mary Joyce; and their dog, Farley.

At CrimeReads she tagged "six slick thrillers that also portray the friends-to-frenemies relationship," including:

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Perhaps no modern book illustrates the danger of friends who don’t have our best interests at heart quite like R.F. Kuang’s captivating exploration of diversity, racism and cultural appropriation. June Hayward can’t get her writing career off the ground, but her pal, Athena Liu, is a literary darling. But when Athena dies choking on not-quite-cooked pancakes, June jumps at an opportunity to steal Athena’s next book and pass it off as her own. June’s every action—and excuse—will make readers gasp and cringe in equal measure, and waiting for her comeuppance keeps the pages turning in this fresh literary thriller.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Yellowface is among Garnett Cohen's seven novels about characters driven by their cravings.

--Marshal Zeringue