6 Chilling Domestic Thrillers Recommended by Author Sarah Vaughan

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA COVER TO COVER BOOK CLUB PICK

“Rich, dark, and intricately twisted, this enthralling whodunit mixes family saga with domestic noir to brilliantly chilling effect.” —Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author

“A haunting, atmospheric, stay-up-way-too-late read.” —Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author

From the New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light.

Be careful who you let in.

Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.

She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.

Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.

In The Family Upstairs, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” (People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.

Stephanie Filgour’s parents are both dead, but she has a new family in the form of her husband, Patrick, and newborn colicky twins. Everything should feel perfect, right? Except the twins don’t sleep and now a woman is claiming that Stephanie’s husband murdered his first wife when she was eight months pregnant. Patrick has told Stephanie it was a tragic accident but hasn’t mentioned a baby: Are there other secrets about him she has yet to discover? Lapena’s new slice of suburban noir conjures up the intense exhaustion, self-doubt, floundering judgment, and paranoia of a first-time, sleep-deprived mother. This family might be small—the baby daughters don’t contribute much beyond their incessant crying—but the atmosphere’s intense.

Hailed by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell as “a force to be reckoned with,” Liz Nugent is back with a powerful and unsettling new novel that will invite comparison to the bitter relationships in HBO’s blockbuster series Succession, as it follows three brothers, bound by blood but split by fate, and delves into the many ways families can wreak emotional havoc across generations.

All three of the Drumm brothers were at the funeral.

But only one of them was in the coffin.

William, Brian, and Luke: three boys, born a year apart, trained from birth by their wily mother to compete for her attention. They play games, as brothers do…yet even after the Drumms escape into the world beyond their windows, those games—those little cruelties—grow more sinister, more merciless, and more dangerous. And with their lives entwined like the strands of a noose, only two of the brothers will survive.

Crisply written and quickly paced, perfect for fans of breathtaking suspense, Little Cruelties gazes unflinchingly into the darkness: the darkness collecting in the corners of childhood homes, hiding beneath marriage beds, clasped in the palms of two brothers shaking hands. And it confirms Liz Nugent—whose work has invited comparisons to Patricia Highsmith and Barbara Vine and has been celebrated as "captivating" (People) and "highly entertaining" (The Washington Post)—as one of the most exciting, perceptive voices in contemporary fiction.

Lucy Atkins’s literary suspense novel looks at a small, dysfunctional family through the eyes of outsider Dee, a slightly eccentric Scottish nanny. Dee is employed by Nick Law, the ambitious new master of an Oxford college, and his second wife, Mariah, a beautiful Scandinavian, to look after his eight-year-old, Felicity, who has been mute since the death of her own mom. The thriller starts with Dee questioned by police, since Felicity is missing. What follows is an examination of narcissistic parenting, a mystery, and an odd-ball love story all wrapped up in Oxford Gothic.

“Taut, clever, compelling, and guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat.” —Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water

From the bestselling author of Anatomy of a Scandal—soon to be a Netflix series—a new thought-provoking novel exploring the complexity of motherhood and all that connects and disconnects us.

You think you know her…but look a little closer.

She is a stay-at-home mother-of-three with boundless reserves of patience, energy, and love. After being friends for a decade, this is how Liz sees Jess.

Then one moment changes everything.

Dark thoughts and carefully guarded secrets surface—and Liz is left questioning everything she thought she knew about her friend, and about herself. The truth can’t come soon enough.

With Sarah Vaughan’s signature “clever and compelling” (Claire Douglas, author of Last Seen Alive) prose, Little Disasters is a tightly-wound and evocative page-turner that will haunt you long after you finish the last page.