5 Jaw-Dropping Thriller Books Featuring Actresses to Add to Your TBR
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hooked on suspense and horror, whether I was reading Nancy Drew novels or watching John Carpenter’s Halloween through splayed fingers. As fond as I am of the macabre, I’m also fascinated by all things celebrity–the glitz and glamour of what seems like an unattainable lifestyle, the sometimes-devastating repercussions of fame that tend to follow our most beloved icons like a curse.
My new thriller, Smile for the Cameras, marries these two worlds. It’s about the cast of an iconic horror film, like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, reuniting to shoot a documentary. Ella, the film’s Final Girl, is desperate to reclaim her acting career and agrees to participate, even though it means confronting painful memories of what happened on set twenty years ago. Life begins to imitate art when a real-life killer—dressed as the film’s iconic villain—begins hunting down Ella and her castmates.
After a career spent writing mainly domestic suspense, where bored housewives and nervous mothers and overwhelmed teachers morph into amateur sleuths, it was refreshing to explore a different world, where the situations are larger than life and each character is hyper-aware of how their every move might be portrayed in the media.
Here are some of my favorite psychological thrillers featuring actresses that put the dark side of celebrity on center stage.
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“A gloriously glossy solid slasher with more unexpected twists than a roller coaster . . . Fans of ’90s horror flicks (like me) are going to lap this up.”–John Marrs, USA Today bestselling author of The Family Experiment
Twenty years ago, Ella Winters was the it girl. She made a name for herself in Hollywood and throughout America as the sole survivor in the cult-classic slasher Grad Night. But the real horror is what happened when the cameras weren’t rolling–something terrible that Ella and her co-stars agreed never to speak of again. Shortly after the movie’s premiere, Ella disappeared from the acting scene under the pretense of caring for her ailing mother, hoping for a quiet life out of the spotlight to ease her guilty mind.
Since her mother’s passing, Ella has decided to return to the silver screen. And with the cast and crew of Grad Night in the process of filming a reunion documentary, Ella has an express ticket back into Hollywood’s good graces. Weighed down by the secret she’s been keeping all these years, Ella apprehensively makes the trip to the original set–a cabin in rural Tennessee–to reunite with her castmates for the first time in more than a decade. But when the actors begin to meet the same gruesome fates as the characters they originally played, falling victim to someone dressed as the Grad Night villain, it’s clear their secret is out.
Now, the question is: Can the final girl survive one last nightmare?
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