Here are 55 books that And Then She Was Gone fans have personally recommended if you like
And Then She Was Gone.
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A missing child is every parent’s worst nightmare. Emotionally driven, tense, full of despair and hope, these stories captivate me. When I decided to include a cold case mystery of a toddler’s disappearance in my debut novel, I dove deep into both true crime and fictional novels on the subject. These books represent a range of gripping mysteries about not only finding missing children, but the scrutiny and heartache their mothers face. I hope you find these stories as absorbing, powerful, and suspenseful as I do!
The Couple Next Door is an addictive page-turner. It’s clever and creative, and nearly every chapter ends with a cliffhanger that practically requires you to keep reading.
Lapena pulls you into the frenzied search for the missing baby while casting doubt onto nearly every character. The use of multiple points of view ratchets up the tension. Entertaining and fast-paced, this is perfect as a beach read. Bonus points as this is a debut novel!
Another thrilling domestic suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Not a Happy Family
"The twists come as fast [as] you can turn the pages." -People
"I read this novel at one sitting, absolutely riveted by the storyline. The suspense was beautifully rendered and unrelenting!" -Sue Grafton
It all started at a dinner party. . .
A domestic suspense debut about a young couple and their apparently friendly neighbors-a twisty, rollercoaster ride of lies, betrayal, and the secrets between husbands and wives. . .
I am Casey Kelleher, a crime writer and author of 17 novels. I have always been a complete and utter bookworm, but my true passion is crime and psych thrillers. Most of my stories concentrate on the victim–or, as I prefer to call them, the survivor. That’s who I champion in my stories, highlighting the strength of that person who has overcome whatever harsh reality that’s been forced upon them. But I also like to get inside the perpetrator’s head. I want to know the ‘whys’ of what they do. Psychology is very complex, but I do believe that there can be good and bad/darkness and light in all of us.
This was a great psychological thriller. What really caught me off guard was how desolate and dire the entire truth of the story turned out to be for everyone involved.
I liked the darkness of the story, and I love Lisa’s writing style. Her stories always pull me in right from the very start. She is a firm favorite of mine.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Girl and The Truth About Melody Browne comes a “riveting” (PopSugar) and “acutely observed family drama” (People) that delves into the lingering aftermath of a young girl’s disappearance.
Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was fifteen, the youngest of three. Beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers, and half of a teenaged golden couple. Ellie was days away from an idyllic post-exams summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her.
A missing child is every parent’s worst nightmare. Emotionally driven, tense, full of despair and hope, these stories captivate me. When I decided to include a cold case mystery of a toddler’s disappearance in my debut novel, I dove deep into both true crime and fictional novels on the subject. These books represent a range of gripping mysteries about not only finding missing children, but the scrutiny and heartache their mothers face. I hope you find these stories as absorbing, powerful, and suspenseful as I do!
Tense and twisty, All the Dangerous Things is psychological suspense at its finest.
It alternates between the past and present, letting dual mysteries unfold. Both storylines are equally interesting and surprising. I was surprised at nearly every turn, and despite my best efforts, unable to predict how either storyline would unfold.
What I really enjoyed is that it would have been easy to dislike the main character, but by learning her backstory in alternating chapters, I grew more invested in this complicated character as the story went on.
The gripping new atmospheric thriller from the author of the instant New York Times bestseller, A Flicker in the Dark
From the author of New York Times bestseller, A Flicker in the Dark, comes an atmospheric new thriller about one woman's search for the truth
'I devoured this in two evenings and i'm adding Stacy as a go-to author... Thriller fans will adore this read.' Prima
'Pacy and sinister, ALL THE DANGEROUS THINGS has a palpable tension that keeps the pages turning.' Sunday Times and internationally bestselling author, Karin Slaughter
'Brilliant! ... I had to finish this marvelous thriller in…
A missing child is every parent’s worst nightmare. Emotionally driven, tense, full of despair and hope, these stories captivate me. When I decided to include a cold case mystery of a toddler’s disappearance in my debut novel, I dove deep into both true crime and fictional novels on the subject. These books represent a range of gripping mysteries about not only finding missing children, but the scrutiny and heartache their mothers face. I hope you find these stories as absorbing, powerful, and suspenseful as I do!
Remember Mia is dark, emotional, and twisty. What I liked most about this book is how much the main character riled me up!
She’s an unsympathetic and unreliable narrator, and it propels the story forward. As this story unravelled, I questioned everything: Is the mother’s postpartum psychosis to blame for the missing child? Why didn’t she report the baby missing? Is there even a missing baby in the first place?
I enjoy when a novel makes me question what I thought I knew.
Like Girl on the Train and Gone Girl, Remember Mia is a riveting psychological suspense, exploring what happens when a young mother’s worst nightmare becomes devastatingly real…
First I remember the darkness. Then I remember the blood. I don’t know where my daughter is.
Estelle Paradise wakes up in a hospital after being found near dead at the bottom of a ravine with a fragmented memory and a vague sense of loss. Then a terrifying reality sets in: her daughter is missing.
Days earlier, Estelle discovered her baby’s crib empty in their Brooklyn apartment. There was no sign of a…
Since my stepfather disappeared in 1982, disappearance has been my obsession. In writing Disequilibria, I read everything I could on missing persons. By now, I might be the chief authority on Missingness! – that is, on disappearance as a theoretical construct. I’m especially interested in how, across different sensibilities (in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but also law, social science, journalism, philosophy, history, and media studies), we can compose a shared language and create shared understanding. My larger goal is to discover creative and redemptive ways of responding to loss, grief, and trauma; to find how disappearance in all its forms creates a framework for understanding what it means to be human.
Aimee Baker’s Doe is a diptych: poems in the first section focus on missing women, while those in the second section reimagine the lives of unidentified women.
Baker creates recurrent, multiple patterns of imagery that celebrate the beauty and dignity of each woman – in argument, essentially, with the ways true crime sometimes exploits and objectifies victims’ lives. At the same time, Doe is about North America as a captivating space of the imagination: the poet creates a geography by turns intimate and vast, familiar and strange, beautiful and terrible.
The finely-crafted textures of the poems in Doe, as well as the apparent dedication to investigation and research in the work overall, make for a rare combination.
Winner of the 2018 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize
Doe began as author Aimée Baker's attempt to understand and process the news coverage of a single unidentified woman whose body was thrown from a car leaving Phoenix, Arizona. It soon grew into a seven-year-long project with the goal to document, mourn, and witness the stories of missing and unidentified women in the United States.
I love thrillers. Mysteries, police procedurals, domestic noir, horror—no matter the sub-genre, I love books that grip me in a well-structured plot. But the books that I re-read, that leave me thinking about them long after, have more than just the pull of a page-turner. There’s a lushness to the language, a psychological complexity to the characters, and the landscapes are alive, vivid, and filled with menace. I call these books “chewy” because, like excellent food, there’s so much to savor. They satisfy my cravings and fill me up, but their flavors and textures add layers to the experience. I hope you’ll devour andsavor these books as much as I have.
Laura McHugh writes about parts of the U.S. that are often either villainized or over-simplified. Instead of leaning into the cliches, she brings these landscapes and their people alive with compassion but without pity. From the first paragraph, I could feel the oppressiveness of the protagonist’s world but I could also see its wild beauty. This is a place where the air is “heavy as a sodden sponge” and insects buzz like an “unholy plague.” The darkness implied in the title has a layered meaning here: there’s the darkness of ignorance, the darkness of the human mind that is capable of justifying cruelty as salvation, and the darkness of hidden and ignored places.
Abducted as a teenager, a woman must now confront her past and untangle the truth of what really happened to her in this dark thriller from the author of The Wolf Wants In.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Self • “Compulsively, propulsively readable.”—Laura Lippman, bestselling author of Lady in the Lake
Seventeen-year-old Sarabeth has become increasingly rebellious since her parents found God and moved their family to a remote Arkansas farmstead where she’s forced to wear long dresses, follow strict rules, and grow her hair down to her waist. She’s all but given up…
I love thrillers. Mysteries, police procedurals, domestic noir, horror—no matter the sub-genre, I love books that grip me in a well-structured plot. But the books that I re-read, that leave me thinking about them long after, have more than just the pull of a page-turner. There’s a lushness to the language, a psychological complexity to the characters, and the landscapes are alive, vivid, and filled with menace. I call these books “chewy” because, like excellent food, there’s so much to savor. They satisfy my cravings and fill me up, but their flavors and textures add layers to the experience. I hope you’ll devour andsavor these books as much as I have.
This book is a meticulous and gut-wrenching story of the unraveling of a family. At its center, is a young woman who is abducted while running in the Rockies, but it is so much more than that (and that story in and of itself is riveting). I’ve always been drawn to stories that look at the ripples of an act of violence. There’s the shock of the act itself, but then there’s all of the days and years after. What Johnston does so beautifully in this story is show how this family unravels but also how each one of them fights like hell to survive within that unraveling and how that hope ultimately saves them all.
As their world comes undone, the Courtlands are drawn into a vortex of dread and recrimination. Why weren't they more careful? What has happened to their daughter? Is she alive? Will they ever know? Caitlin's disappearance, all the more devastating for its mystery, is the beginning of the family's harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths until all that continues to bind them together are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point will a girl stop fighting for her life? Written with a precision that captures…
I am the author of a number of psychological thrillers including The Perfect Family and The Wrong Twin. I like this genre because it really makes your blood pump. For the most part, these are ordinary people who get caught in extraordinary situations so it’s easy to relate. Once you start reading a really good thriller you can’t stop, it’s like riding a roller coaster. It feels exhilarating but it’s totally safe. And the really good ones get you thinking. What would I do in that situation? How would I react?
A child is taken. A family is shattered. But this plays out a little differently than most missing child cases. I definitely did not expect that epic twist. It’s well written and you’ll tear through the pages with the song 99 Red Balloons playing in your head the whole time.
Two girls go missing, decades apart. What would you do if one was your daughter?
Eight-year-old Grace is last seen in a sweetshop. Her mother Emma is living a nightmare. But as her loved ones rally around her, cracks begin to emerge. What are the emails sent between her husband and her sister? Why does her mother take so long to join the search? And is there more to the disappearance of her daughter than meets the eye? Meanwhile, ageing widow Maggie Sharples sees a familiar face in the newspaper. A face that jolts her from the pain of her…
And Then the Sky Exploded came about after I traveled to Japan when my novel, Numbers, was awarded the Sakura Medal, a readers’ choice award voted on by the students in English speaking high school students in Japan. During my time touring and giving author presentations to schools in that wonderful country, I became interested in Japanese culture and history and eventually decided to write a novel exploring one of the most devastating moments of the 20th century—the exploding of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima during World War ll.
So, what are the ingredients that make a thriller thrill? Well, let’s see. I’d probably start with suspense. It’s suspense that has us turning the pages late at night long after we should have turned out the lights and floated off into dreamland. Then there’s believability. I have to be able to believe that the things going on in the story actually happened or at least that they couldhave happened. Otherwise, why would I care? Then mix in characters that matter to me, twists and turns to set the mind spinning, and a well-told story…and that thriller should work. The Leaving works. The story of six kindergarten kids who disappear one day with five of them returning eleven years later—wow, that premise gives me chills just thinking about the possibilities. And Tara Altebrando takes us on a heart-grabbing thrill ride, brimming with suspense, believability, and those twists and turns…
Six were taken. Eleven years later, five come back--with no idea of where they've been. A riveting mystery for fans of We Were Liars.
Eleven years ago, six kindergartners went missing without a trace. After all that time, the people left behind moved on, or tried to.
Until today. Today five of those kids return. They’re sixteen, and they are . . . fine. Scarlett comes home and finds a mom she barely recognizes, and doesn't really recognize the person she's supposed to be, either. But she thinks she remembers Lucas. Lucas remembers Scarlett, too, except they’re entirely unable to…
In addition to being an author, I’m an avid reader, averaging about a book a week. While I enjoy a good historical fiction or NYT bestseller, my go-to is mystery and suspense, and has been since the day my mother first introduced me to Nancy Drew. I’m especially drawn to cold case mysteries, multiple POVs, and complex plots and characters, but I can dive headfirst into a fast-paced beach read with equal pleasure. As a writer by profession, I truly believe reading is the best teacher and I have learned from, and enjoyed, every one of these recommendations immensely. It’s my hope that you'll discover a new-to-you author and love the book you choose.
As a former journalist and magazine editor, I’m all too familiar with the ongoing demise of print media, and so I found myself identifying with protagonist Kate Waters, a journalist fighting to keep her newspaper job by looking for the next big story. Kate thinks she may have found it after reading a short article in her evening newspaper: the discovery of the skeletal remains of a baby at a construction site.
Skillfully told from multiple POVs, this is as much a book about what could have been as what may—or may not—have happened, and Barton is undeniably equal to the task.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow comes a twisting novel of psychological suspense—as seen in People, Entertainment Weekly, Time, USA Today, Bustle, Good Housekeeping.com, HelloGiggles, The Boston Globe, PureWow, The Dallas Morning News, and more!
“The Child is a perfect blend of beach read and book club selection....[A] page-turning whodunit….A novel that is both fast-paced and thought-provoking.”—USA Today
As an old house is demolished in a gentrifying section of London, a workman discovers human remains, buried for years. For journalist Kate Waters, it’s a story that deserves attention. She cobbles together a piece for her newspaper,…
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