Lisa Jewell, author of The Family Remains

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Lisa Jewell: This is a story about a broken family trying to piece itself back together in the aftermath of a shocking reunion, unaware that they are in the encroaching shadow of a detective who has evidence about their pasts that could blow them all to smithereens again. (Which is one very long sentence rather than two!)

GR: What sparked the idea for it?

LJ: I finished writing a book in December 2018 called The Family Upstairs, and as I wrote the last, somewhat unexpected, line, I had the sense of a door opening into another book. I tried to ignore the feeling for as long as I could. I’m not a writer who enjoys revisiting characters and settings, and I like to start afresh with something completely different every time. But the idea of a “part two” kept nagging at me and nagging at me, and eventually I decided to give it a shot.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

LJ: As a 12-year-old, I read the entire Agatha Christie oeuvre in the space of around eight months. I was utterly obsessed. I didn’t read a book again for fun until my early 20s, and nowadays my favorite thriller writers include most of my contemporaries. I love Ruth Ware, Clare Mackintosh, Louise Candlish, Tammy Cohen, Gillian McAllister, and Sabine Durrant.

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

LJ: I’ve lost my reading mojo lately and have become a really slow reader, which I find incredibly frustrating. There are so many books on my TBR pile that I’m aching to get into, but books arrive quicker than I can get around to them all. The book I’m recommending most enthusiastically right now is Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, which is a time-hopping murder mystery with an incredible central premise and brilliant characterization.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?
 
LJ: As a Brit, it would have to be the Madeleine McCann case, of course. She went missing a week before my second daughter was born and would be the same age as my elder daughter now, so I feel a particular connection to her disappearance, and I hate the thought of leaving the world without ever knowing what happened to her. More recently, I have just binged the whole of The Staircase in a week and immediately ordered a book online that promises to provide me with alternative viewpoints in the case. I’m obsessed with wanting to understand what really happened the night that Michael Peterson’s wife died.
 

Jennifer Hillier, author of Things We Do in the Dark

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Jennifer Hillier: When Paris Peralta is arrested in her own bathroom—covered in blood, holding a straight razor, her much-older celebrity husband dead in the bathtub behind her—she knows she'll be charged with his murder. And with the unwanted media attention now surrounding her, there are secrets from her past that Paris doesn't want anyone to know, because the only thing worse than a murder charge are two murder charges.

GR: What sparked the idea for it? 

JH: I knew I wanted to write a story about a violent mother as soon as I finished watching The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, a documentary about a woman who abused her child for years until he died at the age of eight. Gabriel's story ripped my heart out, and I couldn't stop thinking about his mother, now incarcerated for life, and the system that failed to save her son. How could the person who's supposed to love Gabriel the most be the one to hurt him the most? What would he have grown up to be had he lived? Is it even possible to overcome a childhood like that? Things We Do in the Dark grew from there, and while the main character's childhood is only part of the story, it really does inform every choice she makes, well into adulthood.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

JH: There are so many thriller writers I admire, and not enough space to list them all. Off the top of my head: Chevy Stevens, Caroline Kepnes, Riley Sager, Mary Kubica, Shari Lapena, Hannah Mary McKinnon, Lisa Unger, Alafair Burke, Mark Edwards, Will Dean, S.A. Cosby, Samantha M. Bailey, E.A. Aymar, Amina Akhtar, Kellye Garrett, and Alex Segura are automatic buys for me. And I truly hope Oyinkan Braithwaite writes another book—My Sister the Serial Killer is one of my all-time favorites.

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

JH: Kismet by Amina Akhtar, Never Coming Home by Hannah Mary McKinnon, Dark Roads by Chevy Stevens, Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby, Like a Sister by Kellye Garrett, and Watch Out for Her by Samantha Bailey are a few of the great books I've read in 2021-2022. I never hesitate to recommend them to everyone.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

JH: I would say the suspicious deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman in Toronto. The Shermans were a billionaire philanthropic couple who were found hanging side by side from a rail near their basement swimming pool by a real estate agent who was showing their mansion to prospective buyers. According to police, the bodies seemed to be posed, and as of this writing the case still hasn't been solved.
    

Riley Sager, author of The House Across the Lake

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Riley Sager: The House Across the Lake is about a widow staying at her family’s lake house in Vermont who starts watching the glamorous couple on the other side of the water and begins to suspect foul play when the wife suddenly disappears. If that plot seems familiar, well, it absolutely is. But there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Looks can be very, very deceiving.

GR: What sparked the idea for your latest book?

RS: In October 2020, I spent a week at a lake house in Vermont. The first night there, I poured myself a bourbon, sat on the back porch that overlooked the water, and stared at the lights of the houses on the other side of the lake. It got me thinking about who lived there, what their lives were like, and, since I write about such things, what dark secrets they were hiding. I was immediately inspired and spent much of the week on that porch, watching the lake and mentally plotting the story.
 
(On a fun side note, I was told that Dolly Parton has also stayed at that lake house. I like to think I got so inspired because Dolly left some creativity behind and I was lucky enough to find it.)

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

RS: Agatha Christie, of course. Books by Stephen King and Thomas Harris had a huge impact on me in my teens. Today, I’ll read anything by Ruth Ware, Megan Miranda, and Jennifer Hillier.

GR: What are some new mysteries you’ve been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

RS: I loved The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James and My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa, and right now I’m reading and thoroughly enjoying Run Time, the upcoming thriller by Catherine Ryan Howard. One that’s not quite new but that I’ve been telling literally everyone to read is Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

RS: Dyatlov Pass, where nine Russians trekking across the Ural mountains were found dead under very, very strange circumstances. Everything about the case is so bizarre that it’s spawned a multitude of theories, ranging from a Yeti attack to Soviet missile testing to UFOs. Even though experts now seem to have an educated guess about what happened there, there’s still so much left unexplained that I doubt we’ll ever quite know the full story.
    

Ruth Ware, author of The It Girl

Goodreads: Summarize your book in a couple of sentences.

Ruth Ware: Bookseller Hannah lives a peaceful existence in Edinburgh with her husband, Will, but her tranquility is rocked when she learns of the death of college porter John Neville. Neville was convicted of the murder of Hannah’s university roommate, April, almost ten years ago, largely on Hannah’s evidence. Now Neville’s death forces Hannah to dig into the past to confront questions she’s been avoiding for almost a decade—questions that throw everything into doubt.

GR: What sparked the idea for it?

RW: I can’t pin it down to any one conversation or incident, but all my books rest on a personal fear or a “what if” that makes me uneasy in some deep way. Ever since doing jury duty, I had wondered what it would be like to give evidence in a really serious trial—and what if, after the fact, you began to doubt that what you thought you saw was really what happened? This is exactly Hannah’s nightmare—she reports truthfully what she thought happened, but ten years later, with the benefit of hindsight, she realizes how far her own fears and assumptions may have led her astray. I know in her shoes I wouldn’t be able to rest until I found out the truth—and that’s definitely how Hannah feels.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

RW: Oh, so many! Lots of classics, like Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers. This is a university campus novel in many ways, and it’s hard to approach that genre without thinking of Donna Tartt. More contemporary writers I love: Lisa Jewell, Clare Mackintosh, Sarah Pinborough… and I’ve just started Dorothy Koomson’s new thriller, My Other Husband.

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

RW: One of the fun things about writing a novel set (partly) in a bookshop was getting to drop in little winks to books I’ve loved over the past few months. S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland gets a nod in the text, as does Louise Candlish’s The Other Passenger. More recently, I really enjoyed Gillian McAllister’s Wrong Place, Wrong Time.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

RW: The Dyatlov Pass incident is hard to beat for sheer head-scratching weirdness – a group of hikers in a remote mountain pass apparently abandon their tent in the middle of the night in various states of undress and flee into the snowy wilderness where they all either disappear or die of injuries or hypothermia. Various theories have been proposed, and I think the slab avalanche one is fairly persuasive, but we’ll probably never know for sure what happened. Plus, of course, I think any Agatha Christie-phile would love to know what really happened during her famous ten-day disappearance.
   

Katie Gutierrez, author of More Than You'll Ever Know

Goodreads: Summarize your book in a couple of sentences.

Katie Gutierrez: More Than You’ll Ever Know is about Lore Rivera, a South Texas woman secretly married to two men at one time in the 1980s, and Cassie Bowman, an aspiring true-crime writer in 2017 who becomes obsessed with telling her story. The two women form a relationship neither expects, which threatens to unearth secrets they’ve both been keeping. The novel explores The novel explores marriage, motherhood, female ambition and agency, and the moral ambiguities of true crime.

GR: What sparked the idea for it?

KG: When I was in my early 20s, I read a story about a man who’d lived a secret double life for nearly 30 years. He was a father of three with his wife of 53 years. Only 20 miles away, he raised two other children with another woman. Neither family knew about the other until his first wife died and he married the second woman two weeks later. I was fascinated. Over the years, I occasionally searched for double-life stories and noticed that the person with a secret family was always a man. It makes sense: Everything about a patriarchal society enables a man to keep these secrets, if he chooses to. But what if a woman did it—a mother? And what if it happened in my own hometown of Laredo, Texas, during the peso devaluation of the 1980s, when a successful banker might travel internationally without anyone blinking an eye? Then I wondered, if it happened 30 years ago, how an aspiring true-crime writer—an outsider in every way—might interpret, and perhaps try to claim, this double-life story, even with the best intentions to approach its telling ethically. I guess you could say the spark happened a decade before I actually stoked the flame by writing it.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

KG: My all-time favorite has to be Tana French, who is the queen of the atmospheric, character-driven mystery. I especially loved her latest, The Searcher, which is a much slower burn but also a more in-depth character study and exploration of found family, with such a rich sense of place—it inspired me. I also love Megan Abbott, whose novels deconstruct girlhood, womanhood, and ambition with a kind of savage poetry. For thrillers, I’m a huge fan of May Cobb, who is also my critique partner, so I’ve been fortunate enough to read not just her upcoming My Summer Darlings but also her next book, A Likeable Woman. Even in first draft form, her novels are unpredictable and unputdownable, with sharp, witty characterizations, and they never shy away from exploring so-called unlikable women, who happen to be my favorite!

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends?  

KG: I love this question! In some of my favorite recent reads, the mystery or crime may be the narrative engine, but what really drives the books are gorgeous prose, deep observation and insight, and, I think, an interest in almost refiguring the genre. I’ve loved Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka, Shadows of Pecan Hollow by Caroline Frost, Real Easy by Marie Rutkowski, The House on Needless Street and Sundial by Catriona Ward, The Fields by Erin Young, and the upcoming My Summer Darlings by May Cobb and The Last Housewife by Ashley Winstead.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

KG: This is an extremely sad one. On December 20, 2021, an almost-four-year-old girl, Lina Sardar Khil, went missing in my city of San Antonio. Lina and her family moved to San Antonio in 2019 as refugees from Afghanistan. She disappeared from her apartment complex’s recreation center while her mother went back inside for an undetermined amount of time. The case was (and still is) classified as a missing person, not a kidnapping, as there was no evidence of a crime, but multiple searches of nearby wooded areas and creeks have been unsuccessful. It’s impossible not to see my own four-year-old daughter when I look at photos of Lina, and I think of her and her family almost every day. I can’t begin to imagine the pain of not knowing what has happened to your child, especially after moving to a country that was supposed to be safer than where they left. It’s heartbreaking.