I was going to do my five wishes of an author, but I thought of this list at midnight, wrote nothing down, and I forgot half of it, so that will be for another day. I got a few thrillers for the readathon I’m taking part in. I still have one to read, but here are the five I think are the most twisted, even if I can’t say for sure whether some of them had the help of AI. They aren’t well-known, and they kept me hooked.
Goodreads Blurb:
Rookie FBI Agent Sierra Knight follows her murdered mother’s footsteps in joining the FBI, determined to solve her cold case. Armed with a box of unsolved murder files, Sierra must hunt an elusive killer across years of history. But stirring up the past may just leave her to be targeted herself…
When successful women are found murdered and posed facing away from mirrors, FBI Agent Sierra Knight discovers a killer who’s hunting echoes of remembrances past. Racing to decode the pattern behind the victims, can Sierra stop him before another accomplished woman is forced to turn her back on her own success forever?
First, Sierra will have to face her mother’s secretive past, learning things about her she never knew—and may never want to know.
Should the past be left alone?
Amazon Blurb:
When deep-sea scientist Dr. Mara Voss receives a mysterious signal from the unexplored depths of the Pacific, she believes it may finally reveal what happened to her father, who vanished during a classified expedition thirty-one years earlier. Alongside experienced pilot Elias Ward and geologist Lena Okafor, Mara descends aboard the Nereid into a world where sunlight disappears, communications fail, and something beneath the seafloor begins responding to their presence. What they discover is an ancient underground network capable of absorbing human memories, reconstructing voices, and learning from the minds of those who enter its domain. As the expedition turns into a fight for survival, Mara must confront the most dangerous discovery of all: her father’s consciousness may still exist within the network, but she can no longer trust every voice that sounds like him. Trapped thousands of metres beneath the ocean with the surface cut off, the survivors must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to destroy something that may already have learned what humanity is. But even after the trench collapses and the world declares the expedition lost, the darkness does not remain silent. A second signal appears—somewhere much closer to civilization—and a voice whispers a warning that changes everything: “Elias, don’t let them go back down.” In THE DEEP, the ocean is not empty. It is listening. And it remembers.
Amazon Blurb:
The cover-up was no accident at all.
Susan Rostenkowski came to seduce a retired admiral and walk out with his secrets. Wild, reckless, and angrier than she let anyone see, she thought she was the one playing the game.
Hired by Susan’s father — a man with money, reach, and reasons of his own — fixer Gunther Petraeus is sent to find a missing girl and quietly tidy up whatever he finds. He has spent a long career making problems disappear. What he doesn’t plan for is Angela Fletcher: a disgraced young intelligence analyst, one mistake from the end of everything, who keeps tugging the single thread the powerful want left alone.
Together they move through a New York where privilege is armor and a dead girl is just a logistics problem — toward a truth that money has already decided no one will ever hear
Amazon Blurb:
At 3:17 p.m., a woman comes to collect her daughter from school. The child takes one look at her and says: “That’s not my mother.”
Elise Ward knows Rachel Vale.
So does everyone at Hawthorn Primary.
Rachel has attended parents’ evenings, signed school forms, collected eight-year-old Sophie dozens of times and spent eighteen months doing all the ordinary things mothers do.
Every record says Sophie belongs with her.
Sophie says otherwise.
She refuses to leave the school and gives Elise one strange test: her real mother will know about the red umbrella.
Rachel doesn’t.
As Elise begins checking the child’s records, small inconsistencies become impossible to ignore. Sophie’s history seems to begin only eighteen months ago. Her previous school has never heard of her. And somewhere in an old archive is another little girl with the same birthday, the same severe allergy and the same childhood injury.
A girl who is officially dead.
Someone has built a new life around Sophie so carefully that every document agrees.
Now Elise has to discover who the child really is before the people who created that identity come back to collect her.
Because the most dangerous lie isn’t the one nobody believes.
Amazon Blurb:
The woman on Claire Bennett’s daughter’s birth certificate is not her.
When Claire orders a copy of thirteen-year-old Evie’s birth certificate for a school trip, she expects nothing more than routine paperwork.
Instead, she finds another woman’s name where hers should be.
Mother: Laura Dane.
Father: Daniel Bennett — Claire’s husband.
Claire knows Evie is her daughter. She carried her. She gave birth to her. She brought her home.
But before Claire can confront Daniel, an anonymous message lands on her phone:
Before you ask why my name is on that certificate, ask your husband what he did with my daughter.
Now Claire is forced to question everything she thought she knew about her marriage, her child, and the day Evie was born.
Who is Laura Dane?
What really happened thirteen years ago?
And if Claire isn’t the only mother claiming Evie… what has Daniel been hiding?