We Never Saw That Coming: Killer Plot Twists

I love a good twist. I love the moment when the story aligns and you can see the events through two different lenses—the lens of what you’ve assumed is happening, and the lens of what you now know is happening—and all the subtle clues and contrasts between the two become visible. It’s two stories for the price of one: the story you thought you were reading, and the second story hidden inside the first like a geode. Even when I can see the twist coming before it does, it’s still fun to watch the intersection between those two stories.
~C. A. Higgins, "It Was All a Lie: Five Books With Plot Twists that Flip Your Perception"

Do you enjoy a good plot twist?  In movies, the most famous plot twists we think of are in The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense. In books, And Then There Were None always comes up in discussion, and of course, more recently, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. What's your favorite plot twist? We continue to be fooled by the Unreliable Narrator, and are always disappointed by what the pop culture wiki TVTropes calls the Captain Obvious Reveal - this is usually caused by heavy-handed foreshadowing, or if the reader is particularly genre-savvy.

For your reading pleasure, we've put together a list of reads recommended by various scribes of the internet for their finely tuned plot twists, which are practically guaranteed to shock! Some are more recent, some are older, and they are not all mysteries. Which ones have you read? Which ones surprised you most? If we're missing any great plot twists in our list, please let us know in the comments.

Lost Among the Living by Simone St. James

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart [YA]

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery by Agatha Christie 

Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey 

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane  

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James  

Tell No One by Harlan Coben  

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan  

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters [audiobook, eAudiobook] 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson  

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton 

I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh   

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks  

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón  

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt [eBook, eAudiobook] 

November 9 by Colleen Hoover  

The Tourist by Robert Dickinson  

The Trap by Melanie Raabe

 

Links

10 Books With Unexpected Plot Twists [Early Bird Books] 

15 Books to Read If You Love a Shocking Plot Twist [Bustle]

Gone Girl and Other Thrillers With Shocking Plot Twists [Bookish]

The 36 Books With the Biggest Plot Twists [For Reading Addicts]

If You Liked The Girl on the Train, Try Other Novels of Psychological Suspense

I’ve long been a horror fan, too, but I’ve always been more partial to the less-graphic end of the genre, those titles that blend into psychological suspense, horror’s less gory but equally disturbing sibling. When I wrote about psychological suspense five years ago, it was a poor stepsister to horror with a strong following among readers but not much publisher support. The publication of Gone Girl in 2012 changed all that, and now psychological suspense is one of our hottest genres...These chilling novels play with our minds and leave us wondering—about characters as well as plot resolutions. Authors create nightmare situations that the protagonists seek to escape, but these are internal, psychological monsters rather than external or supernatural ones. These novels create claustrophobic worlds of unease and potential disaster in which characters explore their options and, especially, their obsessions, while readers observe from the outside. There’s a growing sense of foreboding, but the compelling pace stems not from action but from the intensity of the mood. Creepy, unsettling, and disturbing are the words we often choose to describe these books—and how they affect us.
~Joyce Saricks, "At Leisure with Joyce Saricks: Psychological Suspense, Horror's Disturbing Sibling"
 
Psychological suspense has been around for a long time. Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw in 1898. Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca is usually called Gothic fiction, but we think it could fit the definition of psychological suspense, sometimes called psychological thrillers - "a suspenseful movie or book emphasizing the psychology of its characters rather than the plot". Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers On a Train (on which Hitchcock's classic movie is based) and The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Shirley Jackson are considered masters of the genre, as was the recently departed Ruth Rendell (who also wrote as Barbara Vine).

Now, with the publication of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, psychological suspense is back in the spotlight. (There's even a sub-genre specially created to encompass these two titles - "chick noir".) We like psychological suspense because the novels are tricky, like mysteries, and creepy, but not as scary as horror (we're literary cowards that way). For all those looking for more in the same vein as the "Girl" novels, we've created a list of titles recommended by Booklist, Goodreads, and our own literary database, NoveList, that we hope will keep you up late at night with all the lights on for a long time to come.

Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook

After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman

Blue Monday by Nicci French

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

The Ghost by Robert Harris

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien

The Book of You by Claire Kendall

Until You're Mine by Samantha Hayes

Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

Help for the Haunted by John Searles

The Night Following by Morag Joss

Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner

The King of Lies by John Hart

Season to Taste by Natalie Young

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse


Looking for more titles? Try a subject search of "suspense fiction" or "psychological fiction", or a keyword search of "psychological suspense".

Featured Author: Stella Rimington

Stella Rimington's Liz Carlyle series is a notable entry in the spy thriller subgenre.  Firstly, her heroine is a female MI5 intelligence officer - not too many female spies getting their own series! Secondly, the author is unequivocally qualified to write these novels as the former Director-General of M15. Rimington worked her way up to this this position, beginning her tenure with the security service in 1967 and working in all three branches, counter espionage, counter subversion, and counter terrorism, before being promoted to Deputy Director-General in 1990 and then to Director-General shortly thereafter.  She was the first female to become Director-General and the first Director-General to be publicly identified, with her picture published in a 1993 booklet called The Security Service. This booklet was part of a campaign Rimington herself "oversaw...to improve the openness of the Service and increase public transparency" [Wikipedia].

Liz Carlyle is a young, hip 34-year-old intelligence officer navigating life as an agent-runner in the counter-espionage division and in a male-dominated agency. Liz's missions delve into murky plots involving Afghani terrorists, the IRA, attempted assassinations of  Russian diplomats, Middle East peace talks, Somali pirates and beyond, all told in the thorough, densely plotted manner of John le Carré. Read Liz Carlyle's team file on Stella Rimington's website!

Read titles from this series (in order of publication) in the library catalog:

At Risk

Secret Asset

Illegal Action

Dead Line

Rip Tide

The Geneva Trap

Close Call

Also consider watching the British TV show MI-5, several seasons of which are in the library catalog.

Readalikes

Blowback by Valerie Plame

Castro's Daughter by David Hagberg

The Cutout by Francine Mathews

The Athena Project by Brad Thor

Bloodmoney by David Ignatius

Death Echo by Elizabeth Lowell

A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka
 

Book Reviews and Plot Twists: Friends or Foes?

Here at abcreads, we're always on the lookout for new books, and reviews can be helpful and hurtful in the search for our next read. Why? Book spoilers. For those of us who enjoy the element of surprise or like to discover the culprit on our own, plot summaries in reviews sometimes tell us more than we want to know. Recently, the Washington Post's fiction editor, Ron Charles, wrote about the dilemma of how much to reveal when writing a book review (spoiler alert! don't read this if you want to stay in the dark about Boy, Snow, Bird). In it, he contemplates the questions: How much is too much? Does revealing a plot twist enhance or hurt the reader experience?

Plot twists can break our hearts, blow our minds, and cause us to question everything we've read in the last 300 or so pages. All-in-all, they give us the irreplaceable feeling of "what just happened?!" If you enjoy a well-crafted plot twist (and haven't already heard about these endings), here are some of our suggestions:

Gentlemen & Players by Joanne Harris

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (ebook)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (ebook)

Atonement by Ian McEwan (ebook)

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

007-The Spy I Love

I don't know about most people, but when I hear mention of the word "spy", the name that comes to mind for me is the ultimate fictional agent James Bond, created by the author Ian Fleming. Mr. Fleming was born in 1908 in Mayfair London to Valentine Fleming (don't you just love his father's name?) and Evelyn St. Croix Rose. Ian was educated at several fine institutions in England and Germany and on the eve of World War II in the European theater, he became the personal assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, director of Britain's Naval Intelligence. Mr. Fleming was involved in several secret plans to topple the German war machine, including planning and gathering intelligence information for 30 Commando, a specialized commando unit, and he was able to use all of his skills and knowledge of intelligence into a successful writing career.

The first James Bond novel was Casino Royale, published in 1953, which was twice made into a film-- in 1967 with Peter Sellers and in 2006 with Daniel Craig. The second film can be found in the library catalog and can be placed on hold if you are not able to find an available copy. It is interesting to find that several of the Bond books were written in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was many years before some of the titles were made into big-screen films.

Several of the Bond novels can be found in the library system. Doctor No, Goldfinger, Thunderball are still available at some of the branches, and there are several reprints and e-book copies available through the digital download section of the webpage. In addition to the novels and films, there are also several other titles that explore the world of James Bond. There are The Moneypenny Diaries by Kate Westbrook, a fun, fictionalized account of the world of James Bond, Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks (billed as the new James Bond novel) published in 2008 and there is even a Young Adult novel called Silverfin: A James Bond Adventure by Charlie Higson. Some great non-fiction titles that delve deep into the Bond franchise are: The Science of James Bond: From Bullets to Bowler Hats to Boat Jumps, The Real Technology Behind 007; The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond; and James Bond by John Cork and Bruce Scivally, which is a great book about the legacy of this enduring and well-loved British agent.

While Mr. Bond may not be a favorite of some, he will always be a part of me, brandishing his quick wit and intelligence, his love for the ladies, but yet enveloping himself with the grim determination to finish the mission and the martini, shaken, but not stirred.