Trend Alert: Exploring the 'Moms in Danger' Thrillers

Look into any so-called publishing trend, and you'll likely find a mysterious creative synergy: After all, today's new releases began to take shape years ago, as their authors drafted whatever most compelled them—wholly unaware that like forces were simultaneously compelling other authors to follow related story threads.

Take, for instance, my new release, Not That I Could Tell. The story was very loosely inspired years ago, not by a trend or a headline but by personal experience: the murder of a friend in a domestic violence incident. The story that evolved bears almost no resemblance to my own, except in the heart of the questions it raises: A young, well-liked mother gone missing becomes a catalyst for her neighbors and friends to grapple, while trying to help find her, with how much we should know about what's happening behind closed doors.

When I first heard Not That I Could Tell couched as part of a trend of "moms in danger" in domestic suspense, I had to pause—I'd not thought of the trend in precisely those terms before—but not for long. A glance at my shelves and again at my "TBR" pile proved the observation right and got me thinking about the forces at play far beyond my own writer's room.

Did it begin with the plight of Celeste planning her hope-she-won't-need-it escape in Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies? The concern over where Bernadette went in Maria Semple's breakout hit? A 24-hour news cycle filled with real-life mothers revealed too late to have been, unbeknownst to their friends and family, in serious jeopardy?

All of the above, perhaps. The domestic suspense genre is defined by a threat that comes not from a stranger but from within our inner circles. And while these stories often, but not always, feature subsets of "suspicious husbands" and "children in danger" (I’ve written about both myself; in my 2017 debut, Almost Missed You, a "perfect" husband absconds with his young son in the middle of a family vacation), perhaps it's this new subset that strikes women readers, and mothers in particular, as the most heart-gripping of all.

Because while most of us would and do selflessly put our children before ourselves—and while little is more unthinkable than something horrible happening to the people we love most—a threat to our safety is a threat to our families. We would fight, with all our being, to get back to them or to remain at their sides.

And thus we fight vicariously right alongside these protagonists, on a primal level as well as an emotional one.

On bestseller lists of late, mothers also vanished—are they dead or alive?—in page-turners like Janelle Brown's Watch Me Disappear and Chris Bohjalian's The Sleepwalker, and found themselves unwitting targets in psychological thrillers such as Shari Lapena's The Couple Next Door, Liv Constanine's The Last Mrs. Parrish, and Mary Kubica's Every Last Lie.

As this wavelength continues into 2018, here are some other titles I've enjoyed so far and a few I'm looking forward to getting my hands on: