Four Classic Twists in Mystery and Suspense Fiction
When I’m reading mystery and suspense, there’s nothing I love more than a satisfying twist. They’re not easy to do! A good twist has to feel both surprising and inevitable: it sneaks up on you, out of nowhere, but later you realize that it makes perfect sense. It casts a new light on everything that came before. The best twists cause me to flip frantically back to the beginning of the book, trying to spot the magic trick that I’d missed the first time around. Here are a few novels that feature my favorite, classic twists. I won’t give any away—you’ll have to read them for yourself.
A delicious, haunting, gothic story about how the biggest surprises aren’t always waiting for us in the future—sometimes they’re hidden in the past. The narrator is a young woman who marries the widower Maxim de Winter, and is quickly intimidated by the stories about his deceased first wife: Rebecca, the beautiful woman whose presence still lingers in Manderley. How can she ever possibly live up to Rebecca? But the truth is more complicated, and more sinister, than our narrator realizes.
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About Anna Pitoniak
Anna Pitoniak is the author of The Futures and Necessary People. She worked for many years in book publishing, most recently as a Senior Editor at Random House. She grew up in Whistler, British Columbia, and now lives in New York City.