I love twisty thrillers, don’t you? But I don’t always buy the obsessive-love motivation.  Like, does our character not know how many handsome men / beautiful women are out there? Sometimes I really have to be helped into believing the obsessed-romance storyline.  But there can be a compelling, and fascinating motivation in a dysfunctional friendship, and it powers a lot of the drama in these thrillers. Here are some of the best twisty thrillers about twisted friendships.

 

I just loved The Girls Are All So Nice Here, by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn. This unsettling, dark suspense story happens in two timelines, both mostly set at Wesleyan. Ambrosia’s keeping some secrets from college, never mentioning what happened freshman year or how she was involved. Now, with her ten-year reunion looming, anonymous notes hint that someone knows what she and her friend did.

In their freshman year at Wesleyan, Sloane (who goes by Sully), says she gets bored easily. She embraces every kind of experimentation, and Amb is immediately drawn to her wild-girl ways. Amb’s already hooked on their intense friendship when she starts to realize that Sully loves experimenting on other people and playing manipulative games.  There’s an unsettling mix of relatable freshman anxiety crossed with twisted manipulation that makes the story such a page-turner.  The story of Sloan and Amb’s twisted friendship, with silly lies and dark secrets, is perfect for fans of Good Girls Lie or Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game.

Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton, is another gripping suspense about an intense, dysfunctional friendship in Manhattan. Louise is working a depressing and tiring collection of odd jobs to get by in the city, when she meets glamorous, fun-loving, incredibly wealthy Lavinia, and is immediately pulled in to her lifestyle. Louise knows that their unequal “friendship” is based on being available and agreeable for whatever Lavinia wants, without ever letting on that this might be an act. The suspense is amazing throughout the book, mostly as readers see what Louise is willing to do to keep her lifestyle.

Without giving away too much about the crime,  I’ll say that I just loved the suspense as the murderer kept up the victim’s social media accounts, and laid an alibi in inspirational quotes over fake travel pictures and check-ins. Social Creatures uses Manhattan ambition and intense, twisted friendship to set up a page-turning thriller with a dark crime and a twisted cover-up.  (My full review is here.)

The Goddesses, by Swan Huntley, the author of We Could Be Beautiful, is about a twisted friendship, where one person has an entirely different agenda. Nancy and her family relocate to Kona, in Hawaii, presumably for her husband’s job but really for a fresh start after problems with her husband’s drinking and their teenage sons’ troublemaking. She meets Ana almost immediately, when she’s alone in an new city. This is such an intense read because you know almost from the start that Ana is bad news, that things don’t quite add up, and that she’s lying about at least some of her past, but she’s also the only person who really seems to see Nancy and care about what she thinks.

Confessions on the 7:45, by Lisa Unger, is a suspense novel, beginning with two seemingly-random women and two sets of secrets. Selena knows her husband is cheating, and when her new friend, “Martha” announces that she’s having an affair with her boss. From here, the story gets darker and their connection seems less and less like a random encounter.

This tense novel is perfect for fans of The Wife Between Us and An Anonymous Girl, both by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, and for fans of the relationship of necessity found in Janelle Brown’s Pretty Things. 

At the beginning of The Better Liar, by Tanen Jones, Leslie’s father’s will gives a large inheritance to each daughter, on the condition that both sisters collect in person, together. The problem is that Leslie hasn’t seen her sister Robin in years, since her rebellious sister took off, into a haze of drugs and boyfriends.

Leslie tries to track down her sister, but in a surprising move for the suburban wife and mother, Leslie convinces another Las Vegas drifter with a passing resemblance to Robin to come home and pretend to be her sister, for a share of the inheritance.  The “sisters” go back to meet with the lawyer and claim their inheritance, while trying to avoid people who know the real Robin, setting off a twisty web of secrets and lies.  This is more frenemies than friendship, but the relationship between Leslie and “Robin” is the center of the story. Characters keep lying, getting caught, and explaining it away with either a piece of backstory OR a new lie, and it’s impossible to look away, until the final twist took me completely by surprise.

Fans of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s The Obsession will enjoy the layers of lies here.

Bonus: In Fiona Barton’s The Suspect, two teenage girls disappear while on a backpacking trip to Thailand. This is more of a police investigation than the other books I’ve listed, it’s more of a general mystery than a look into a twisted friendship. But a great deal of the investigation looks into Alex and Rosie’s friendship, or whether a real friendship even exists, and it’s interspersed with flashbacks about their travels. Alex reveals her honest feelings and true experiences through emails to her real friend, Mags, back home, and this sheds light on both the missing girls and Rosie’s real character.

One more bonus book:  In Donna Tartt’s classic The Secret History. although our protag is a young man, a great deal of his motivation comes from following his friend group and trying to fit in. This is more about Richard quietly observing dysfunctional friendships than fully participating (he’s not even present at one of the key moments of conflict), but the twisted, intense relationships propel this story to a terrifying, disturbing action and even more disquieting aftermath.

 

Have you read these? What other suspense titles about twisted friendships should I read?