Books like “Dark Places”

What to read after “Dark Places” by Gillian Flynn: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

About “Dark Places”

Another favorite book?

Or start with a well-known book

1
The Woman in the Window
A. J. Finn · 2018
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Twist Ending
Child psychologist Anna Fox lives alone, unable to leave her home, and spends her days watching her neighbours through a camera. When she sees something in the house across the street, no one believes her, and she is left to work out whether the danger is real or in her mind.
2
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Twist Ending
Rachel rides the same commuter train every day and invents stories about a couple she sees from the window, until she learns the woman has vanished. Her memory of the night in question is full of gaps, and she cannot tell how much of what she believes is real.
3
Before I Go to Sleep
S. J. Watson · 2011
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Each morning Christine wakes with no memory of her life, and each day her husband explains who she is. When she starts a diary at a doctor's suggestion, she finds entries in her own hand that contradict what he tells her, and that suggest her past holds a crime.
4
Sometimes I Lie
Alice Feeney · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Amber Reynolds is in a coma, though she can hear the people around her and cannot move or speak. In her mind she sifts through the days before the accident and the diary entries from years earlier that do not quite match the life she thought she had.
5
A Flicker in the Dark
Stacy Willingham · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
As a child she helped put her father away for killing girls. Twenty years later she is a therapist about to marry, when young women in her town begin to disappear again and the old case follows her into the present.
6
The Kind Worth Killing
Peter Swanson · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted tells a stranger that he wishes his cheating wife were dead. Lily calmly offers to help him plan it. As their murder scheme takes shape in Boston, each of the narrators hides a past the others know nothing about.
7
The Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides · 2019
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Twist Ending
Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times and then never spoke again. Six years later, psychotherapist Theo Faber takes a job at the secure unit where she is held, determined to make her talk. As he digs into her diary and her past, his own reasons for being there come into question.
8
The Housemaid
Freida McFadden · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Twist Ending
A woman with no money and a criminal record takes a live-in job cleaning for a wealthy family. The wife is cruel, the husband is kind, and a locked door upstairs keeps drawing her attention as the household's rules grow stranger.
9
Local Woman Missing
Mary Kubica · 2021
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Twist Ending
In a quiet suburb, a young mother vanishes while out running, and weeks later another woman and her six-year-old daughter disappear nearby. Eleven years on, the daughter suddenly returns, and what she brings back unsettles everyone who stayed behind.
10
The Last Mrs. Parrish
Liv Constantine · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
An ambitious woman works her way into the life of a rich, seemingly perfect couple, planning to take the wife's place. The household she longs to join has secrets of its own, and neither woman is quite what she pretends to be.
11
A Simple Plan
Scott Smith · 1993
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Three men find a crashed plane, a dead pilot and a bag of money in the snow. What starts as a quiet decision to keep the cash spirals into suspicion, lies and violence, as each tries to hold together a plan that keeps changing.
12
Sharp Objects
Gillian Flynn · 2006
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Reporter Camille Preaker returns to her small hometown to cover the murders of two girls. She must face her mother and half-sister, and her own memories, while the pressure of the assignment pushes her back toward the habits she has tried to leave behind.