Women Whose Books Thrill and Leave You Breathless

Date night at the movies? Think again. A recent Saturday Night Live skit portrayed a bevy of women eager to ditch their husbands and boyfriends for an evening and dive right into a streamed Netflix or Hulu thriller, texting OMG!!! and Munch-scream emojis to their sisters and girlfriends.

And who among us doesn’t love a murder show? Many a pulse-raising film or television dramatization is inspired by an original book or books, though, from Agatha Christie’s Poirot mysteries to P.D. James’s Inspector Dalgliesh series to Killing Eve, which was based on Luke Jennings's Codename Villanelle. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve sheltered in place with the village cozies and gritty urban dramas, even the romantic and pictorial sweep of Kenneth Branagh’s interpretation of Dame Christie’s Death on the Nile. And often we’ve sought out the printed version from an independent bookseller or library.

As the season turns, there’s a bumper crop of female writers who have enlarged the thriller form, writing in a literary register while probing themes of equity and complex connections to family, career, and culture. Thrillers offer tantalizing plots and moods—whodunit, how and why, is that dead body or just a MacGuffin?—that these writers flesh out in innovative ways, sifting through clues to an ever more incomprehensible and consequential world. From a secretive veiled society in Pakistan to Iowa’s cornfields, from Greenland's glaciers to New York’s hip-hop salons, these emerging talents spin webs of suspense that ensnare us and won’t let go until the last page. The future is bright for these scribes of our darker impulses.