Author Lisa Jewell Shares Her Favorite Domestic Suspense Novels

It’s about reminding us how lucky we are to wake up every morning and find everything still to be perfectly in place.

And while our instincts for self-preservation are strong and overwhelming, never do we need a safety net more than when we have a family to protect.

Every book I’ve written has been about family, in one form or another. From the family blighted by a mother’s compulsive hoarding disorder in The House We Grew Up In to the family of strangers connected only by their DNA in The Making of Us, the family split apart by the disappearance of a daughter in Then She Was Gone, the family coping with a father who keeps leaving and starting again in The Third Wife, and now in my latest novel, The Family Upstairs, a family falling for the charms of a controlling Svengali who wants to destroy them; family forms the skeleton of every story I want to tell. And the backbone of every family is, as we all know, the mother.

Here are some incredible recent psychological thrillers, all of which have a mother and her family at their core: a vengeful mother, a missing mother, a grieving mother, a scared mother, a haunted mother, a worried mother, a lost mother, a confused mother—all reacting in one way or another to a threat to the safety of their family or the loss of a child.

What domestic suspense novel would you recommend to your fellow readers? Let's talk books in the comments!

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