Small Towns, Big Secrets: Crime Fiction Set In Claustrophobic Communities

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Throughout many, many drafts of The Neighbor’s Secret, I rethought or rewrote almost all of the novel’s elements—the characters and their motivations, the pacing, the reveals, the title, the title, the title.

I never budged on the setting.

Cottonwood Estates, a small, close-knit community tucked into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the type of neighborhood where everyone smiles and says hello and knows each other’s families and looks out for one another. Or at least pretends to.

What is it about small communities? As a reader of suspense, I am always excited to be dropped into one. My mind goes into overdrive: Is this place cozy. . .or claustrophobic?

Can we trust that friendly smile . . . or is there a sliver of something evil behind it?

Is the rampant gossip a sign of affectionate familiarity. . . or an attempt to manipulate the narrative?

Below are some of my favorite novels in which a small town is the perfect incubator for some truly grisly secrets:

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

If you blink, you might miss Lark, Texas, a tiny former plantation in Shelby County. There’s a restaurant at one end of town, a bar on the other, and very little in between—although one of the residents does live in a replica of Monticello.

When two dead bodies—that of a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman— are found in town, Ranger Darren Matthews travels to Lark to investigate. Through his outsiders’ eyes, the reader can sense the town secrets and subtext just out of grasp. As the novel unspools, so do they.

Know before you go (er, read): “There were things you didn’t do in Lark, Texas. And picking apart bloodlines was one of them.”

A Bitter Feast by Deborah Crombie

A Bitter Feast takes place in a tranquil Cotswolds village between Upper and Lower Slaughter, where Scotland Yard Detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James are hoping to spend a quiet weekend away from London. All hopes of relaxation are lost, however, when Duncan is involved in a car accident that kills the two passengers of the other car.

Toxicology reports make clear that one of the passengers—a famous chef seen just before the accident in the local pub— had been poisoned, and had died before the accident. Later that weekend, there’s another murder linked to the pub.

As Kincaid, James and their colleagues delve into the mystery, the village residents’ secrets—embezzlement, affairs, jealousies, resentments and toxic relationships—are aired. Crombie is as skilled with the plot twists as with her descriptions of the countryside.

Know before you go: “The lane was narrow, banked by hedges, and as the incline gently dropped it was increasingly covered by overarching trees. Gemma began to see long, low limestone cottages on either side of the lane.”

Everything I never Told You by Celeste Ng

In the small Ohio college town where the Marilyn and James Lee raise their three children, everyone knows each other, and nothing bad ever happens.

Until it does. When Lydia Lee fails to come down for breakfast one morning, her disappearance unearths both family and community secrets and makes clear the burdens teenaged Lydia had been shouldering: of being bi-racial in an all-white community, of being a conduit for her parents’ dreams, of striving to be exceptional while somehow also conforming to a town that smothers difference.

Know before you go: “Any death is a sensation in a small town.”

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

King’s Abbott, as described by our chatty narrator James Shepard, has a railway station, two general stores, many unmarried ladies and retired military officers, and—of course—gossip.

Also: suspicious deaths, close together. When his neighbor Roger Ackroyd is stabbed in his study shortly after the suicide of his fiancée, the great Hercules Poirot (conveniently in King’s Abbott tending to vegetable marrows!) comes out of retirement to solve the case.

This one is famous for its virtuoso twist, but Agatha Christie also nails the description of a small, familiar village, where everyone is perhaps a little too much in each other’s business.

Know before you go: “Our hobbies and recreations can be summed up in the one word, ‘gossip.’”

Faithful Place by Tana French

Detective Frank Mackey grew up in Faithful Place, a neighborhood consisting of two rows of eight red brick houses in Dublin. At nineteen, he and his girlfriend Rosie O’Daly plotted to flee their small flats and oppressive families for a better life in London. On the night of their planned departure, however, Rosie failed to show up.

Twenty-two years later, when Rosie’s suitcase is found in an abandoned building, Frank is compelled to return for the first time to Faithful Place and its stifling dynamics. The answer of what happened to Rosie Daly is closer than Frank suspected, and unfortunately, only discoverable through deft work of the neighborhood information mill.

Know before you go: “The rules in my road went like this  . . . you never ever squeal on anyone.”

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

When Noemí Taboada’s father receives a distressing letter from his newlywed niece—with claims that she’s been poisoned by her new husband and haunted by ghosts—he dispatches Noemí to visit her cousin and suss out the truth. Noemí travels from Mexico City to a small dusty town that seems “stuck in time” and then up a treacherous hill to High Place, the sinister family compound of the Doyle Family.

There’s not much talking at High Place—not at dinner, not among the silent servants, and not by Noemí’s cousin. There are, however, “secrets upon secrets” about the Doyles’ treacherous history, which has infected the family and the surrounding town–and the family’s twisted plans for the future.

Know before you go: “After all, nothing in this place was what it seemed.”

The Girls in the Garden by Lisa Jewell

Virginia Park is idyllic, the perfect place to raise children, or so think many of the parents who choose to live there, an oasis in Central London where homes spill out to a communal garden. Largely untended to, the children are free to roam from one home to the other. When newcomer Clare Wild moves in with her children, Grace and Pip, she mistakes the community for an Eden, a respite from the outside world.

Then Grace is found bleeding and unconscious in the garden—in a crime that is uncomfortably similar to the unsolved death of a 15-year-old girl twenty years prior. There are thorny secrets hidden in the lovely rose bushes at Virginia Park, which turns out to be every bit as lethal as the big city outside.

Know before you go: “Things happen in that park differently to how they happen in the real world. Different rules apply.”

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

The town of Balamara is a single street, where the scattered population of Queensland ranchers meet to drink and gossip. When the body of local cattle rancher Cameron Bright is found at an unmarked stockman’s grave outside of town, his brother Nathan Bright investigates why. Finding the answer requires exposing family secrets and Nathan’s rocky history with the small community. Harper gives us punishing heat, long dusty roads between ranches, and—despite the isolation—a suffocating familiarity that makes it almost impossible for the remaining Brights to outrun their mistakes.

Know before you go/read: “The landmark was known to the locals—all sixty-five of them, plus one hundred thousand head of cattle—simply as the stockman’s grave.”

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