What to read after “The Lady Vanishes” by Ethel Lina White: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
A snowdrift halts the Orient Express, and by morning an American passenger is found stabbed in his locked compartment. With the train stranded, Hercule Poirot questions thirteen passengers whose accounts do not add up, and uncovers the threads of an old crime.
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.
Lord Peter Wimsey is intrigued when a corpse is found in a bathtub wearing nothing but a pair of gold pince-nez, while a financier has gone missing. Aided by his butler Bunter and a Scotland Yard inspector, he works out how the body came to be there.
After Kristallnacht, a Jewish businessman escapes his Berlin apartment and begins moving from train to train across Germany. Unable to leave the country, he tries to hide his identity while the network of trains becomes both shelter and trap.
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.
Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown runs a small gang on the Brighton seafront and commits a murder to hold his position. A cheerful, persistent woman who barely knew the victim decides to find out what really happened, closing in on a boy who believes he is beyond ordinary justice.
When a girl is found dead in a wood outside Dublin, detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox take the case. For Rob the woods hold an old horror: as a child he was found there after two friends vanished, and he has never told anyone the full truth.
Ten years after her teenage daughter disappeared, a mother learns what happened and tries to rebuild her life. Meeting a new partner and his young daughter, she is unsettled by small resemblances to her lost child, which reopen the case.
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.
Four armed men seize a New York City subway train, taking seventeen passengers hostage and demanding a fortune within an hour. As the city negotiates, a transit police lieutenant races to understand the hijackers' escape plan before the deadline runs out.
On a train, a charming stranger proposes an idea to architect Guy Haines: each man could murder the person ruining the other's life, since no one would suspect them. Guy dismisses it as a joke, until the other man acts on the plan and pulls him into a nightmare of guilt that neither can escape.
A couple leave their sleeping baby at home while they attend a dinner party next door, checking on her every half hour. They return to an empty crib. The police suspect the parents, and both of them start learning what the other has been hiding.
A detective who closely resembles a murdered woman is asked to pose as her among the victim's friends. Living inside another person's life, she finds the group's shared past and its secrets closing in on her own sense of who she is.
Stan Carlisle works the carnival, watching the geek at the bottom of the show and vowing never to fall that low. Clever and ambitious, he moves from a mind-reading act to spiritualist con, fleecing the rich, until his own past catches up with him.
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.
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears from a rented house and her husband Nick becomes the prime suspect. Two narrators tell very different versions of the same marriage.
A lonely young clerk who collects butterflies wins money and buys a country house, where he keeps the art student he has admired from afar as his prisoner. Told by both captor and captive, the novel traces the strange, uneasy months they spend together.
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.
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.
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.
Five killers board the same bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka, each with a different mission and a different plan. A suitcase of ransom money ties their missions together, and the confined carriages turn every polite encounter into a threat.
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.
Years after her mother and sisters were killed and her teenage brother was convicted, Libby Day is approached by a group of true-crime enthusiasts who believe he is innocent. Short of money, she agrees to ask questions, and the answers force her to revisit what she remembers of that night.
Tom Ripley, a poor young man in New York, is sent to Italy by a rich shipbuilder to bring home his son Dickie. Instead Tom is drawn into Dickie's comfortable world and, when it is threatened, does whatever it takes to keep it.
Start with “Murder on the Orient Express”, “The Girl on the Train”, “Whose Body?”: they are the closest to “The Lady Vanishes” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “The Lady Vanishes” these are Train Journey, Missing Person, Psychological Thriller), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “The Girl on the Train”, “The Woman in the Window”, “In the Woods”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
