October’s Best Psychological Thrillers

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Hello, readers of the thriller! If life isn’t rough enough for you here are some books that will make you think, Hell, she’s got it worse than I do. This is known as the First Law of Exploitation in the Official Crime Writers Handbook, which is like the DSM-IV with a body count. And the book is terribly hard to find, and quite expensive. Let’s see what the writers are up to in October.

Tara Laskowski, The Mother Next Door
(Graydon House)

Ivy Woods Drive—sounds classy, doesn’t it? A lush cul-de-sac in a fancy suburb where the women all wear athleisure and plan parties and the men spend their time at work or on the golf course. You get it. In Mother, Laskowski has created a clique of mean women—the Ivy Five—who run the much-lauded Halloween block party which they have raised to the heights of a Puff Daddy white party. When a new mother moves in she gravitates toward the impossibly cellulite-free and Botox-filled Ivy Five and finds out they have a much longer and more nefarious agenda than an apple with a razor blade,

James Han Mattson, Reprieve
(William Morrow)

Only four contestants get to the final room of the full-contact Quigley House, the most ghoulish and clever escape room in London. The twist is that they have to move through the tricks and traps that Quigley is famous for without shouting the safe word: “reprieve.” But something is not right: before the group can even get started, one of them is murdered by a man who penetrates their cell. Mattson uses this setting as a way to ruminate about each of the contestants and the choices they made, one of which must be connected to the killer. Right?

Kwon Yeo-sun, Lemon
(Other Press)

The latest Korean writer to make a worldwide splash is Kwon Yeo-Sun, a respected and popular author whose English-language debut, Lemon, is so taut and compelling I can only hope the translators are hard at work on her backlist. The gist is that a 2002 crime, the High School Beauty Murder, remains unsolved for 17 years. The narrative propeller of the book is not crime, or not just crime—it’s all of the stuff of motive, from privilege to vengeance. Lemon is a gift. Savor it.

Romy Hausmann, Sleepless
(Flatiron Books)

We are sticking with the thriller-in-translation theme (or maybe it’s more of a crime is universal theme) as our next book is German author Romy Hausmann’s follow-up to her very successful debut, Dear Child. Sleepless has a similar aura to Child: again, we are in a remote place. Again, Hausmann builds claustrophobic suspense, focusing on two female friends rather than a mother and child. The book is a testament to how secrets infiltrate all of our most important relationships, and how far we will go to keep them. “Would you help your best friend bury a body?” the flap copy asks, a favor that is not as serious as helping someone move but is neck-in-neck with a ride to the airport.

Toni Halleen, The Surrogate
(Harper Collins)

This novel dives fearlessly into the fragile triangular relationship between an infertile couple and the surrogate they hire to carry their child. Ruth—carefully described as “fortysomething,” as if her age is an embarrassment and who does she think she is wanting a baby when her eggs are surely rotting? Her husband, Hal, already has two teenage boys, but is willing to do whatever to make Ruth’s dream of motherhood happen. The potential surrogate, Callie, is a nineteen-year-old who wants to go to college, something she could finance with the money from being a surrogate. But when her boyfriend shows up and Callie starts getting cold feet, and they arrange an escape from the hospital immediately after her child—or is it Ruth and Hal’s child?—is born. Halleen is not afraid to examine the emotional and legal implications of surrogacy, a brave undertaking for a debut novelist.

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