Settling Into Fall With Quietly Suspenseful Reads
by eapearce
Perhaps you recently read The Girl on the Train, in preparation for seeing the soon-to-be-released movie version and are wondering where to turn next to get that tingly feeling of suspense that a mind-bending mystery offers. Or perhaps you’re still looking for something as good as Gone Girl to blow your reading mind. Or maybe you just like to read suspenseful stories in autumn, as I do, and are looking for the perfect one to kick off the season. No matter what the reasoning, the AADL has a slew of great psychological mysteries to send chills up your spine:
In All the Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda, Nicolette returns to her hometown after ten years away to care for her ailing father. She’d left a decade ago after her best friend disappeared without a trace. The ensuing investigation focused on Nic, her boyfriend, her brother and Corinne’s boyfriend, and since then Nic is the only one who’s left town. When another girl goes missing just days after Nic’s return, she’s determined to figure out what’s going on—and hopefully find out what really happened to Corinne so long ago. The story is told backwards from the date that the girl disappears which makes all the shocking truths that are revealed even more surprising, and plays tricks on the mind that will delight even the most unflappable of readers.
Unbecoming, written by Rebecca Sherm and published last year, offers readers a seemingly tragic story: after two men that she loves attempt to rob a historical mansion and land in prison, a woman flees to Paris to try and start a new life away from them and their memory. Living under an assumed identity and working in a shady antiques-repair shop, readers follow along as her lies unravel and the truth behind her past, the heist and her future plans come to light. Fans of The Girl on the Train will enjoy this one in particular.
Lisa Jewell paints an initially idyllic scene in The Girls in the Garden, of a picturesque communal park in urban London, but the image is quickly shattered when a girl finds her sister’s potentially lifeless body among the rose bushes. The book backs up from this moment, introducing us to the sisters and telling the story of how they and their single mother came to live in one of the small flats by the park. As we make it forward to the night of the attack, readers are introduced to a series of suspicious characters and find out about the disappearance of another teenaged girl who lived by the park twenty years before. Are the crimes linked? Or have two separate criminals graced the park with their presences?
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