If you are feeling withdrawal from The Girl on the Train, two thrillers may help you sort through your need for psychological suspense.
You Will Know Me
Did the Greeks have the modern formula in mind when they prepared for the Olympics? In Megan Abbott’s thriller You Will Know Me, the author uses girls’ gymnastics as the focus for yet another unreliable narrator with a killing secret.
The story envelopes the reader in a family’s ambition to see daughter, Devon, rise to the top, with financial and psychological cost to both her and her family. Only the younger brother, Drew, seems unscathed until later in the plot, when he too becomes an unlikely and silent victim. As mother Katie tells the tale, she notes three pieces of the story driving the eerie plot: a lawn mower accident with her three year old daughter’s foot, cutting off her toes; her daughter’s fall at the end of a competition; and the pit in the renovated gym, bringing a handsome lover into their lives.
Although finding the killer keeps the suspense, the lives of the young gymnasts and their hovering parents may be more frightening.
Dear Mr. M
Herman Koch once again managed to scare me in the first fifty pages, with the promise of more eerie episodes yet to be explored. I still shiver when I think of reading The Dinner and Summer House With a Swimming Pool. I may wait to read Mr. M another time, but here is the short summary, if you are up to it. When the book opens, Mr. M is being stalked by his neighbor who has a mysterious connection to his past.
“Once a celebrated writer, M had his greatest success with a suspense novel based on a real-life disappearance. It told the story of a history teacher who went missing one winter after having a brief affair with a beautiful student of his. The teacher was never found. Upon publication, M’s novel was a runaway bestseller, one that marked his international breakthrough.” Kirkus
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