16 Books With the Best Plot Twists, Ranked by the Second Read

A wealthy man is found dead in his study in an English village where everybody has a reason to be nervous, and Hercule Poirot, supposedly retired and growing vegetable marrows next door, takes the case. For two hundred pages you get a very good village mystery: gossip, servants, a missing letter, a small circle of suspects who all had a bad evening. What you get at the end is the reason people are still arguing about this book a century later. It reads much faster than its age suggests, because Christie wrote for people on trains, not for people in seminars.

Yasuko works at a bento shop in Tokyo and wants nothing more than a quiet life for herself and her daughter. Her neighbour Ishigami teaches maths and has noticed her in the way lonely people notice one single thing very hard. When something terrible happens in her flat, he offers to handle it, and the book becomes a duel between his logic and a physicist who studied with him years earlier. Higashino gives you a great deal very early, which sounds like a mistake and is not. The pleasure is watching two clever men work while you slowly realise you have misread the question. The English translation appeared in 2011.

Sue Trinder grows up among thieves in a London house where stolen goods pass through the kitchen like groceries. A charming crook recruits her to pose as a maid to a sheltered heiress in a damp country house, win her trust, and help push her towards a marriage and then an asylum. Waters writes the period without museum dust: raw hands, cold rooms, laundry, the smell of money. The first third takes its time on purpose, so give it room. Somewhere near the middle the floor moves, and everything you were certain about has to be rebuilt out of the same bricks.

Ten people with something to hide are invited to a house on an island off the Devon coast. The host never appears. A recording accuses each of them of a death nobody could prove in court. Then they begin to die in the order the rhyme sets out. The book is barely two hundred pages and Christie throws away nearly everything a mystery usually leans on: no detective, no interviews, no comfortable armchair explanation from a clever Belgian at the end. What is left is arithmetic and fear, and a solution she was honest enough to lay out in full once the counting stops.

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, Briony Tallis watches her older sister and the housekeeper's son by the fountain and reads the scene completely wrong. What she does with that misreading costs everybody, and the novel follows the damage through the retreat to Dunkirk and a London hospital in wartime, in prose that slows down exactly where you want it to hurry. McEwan is interested in the gap between what happened and what later gets written down about it, which is why the final section does what it does. Read the country house chapters carefully. They are doing more work than they appear to be doing.

Amy Dunne goes missing from a rented house in a dying Missouri town, and her husband Nick behaves on camera exactly the way a guilty man behaves. The book alternates his account with her old diary entries, and Flynn writes both voices with a nastiness that is genuinely funny in places. What it is really about is the performance two people put on for each other while courting and the bill that arrives years later. The prose is sharper than the film let on, particularly about money, small towns after the crash, and the way couples lie to each other by leaving things out.

Pi Patel grows up in a zoo in Pondicherry, collects religions the way other children collect stamps, and ends up adrift in the Pacific with a tiger named Richard Parker. Most of the book is survival at sea, written with a lot of practical detail about water, fish and fear, and a lot of argument about God. It is funnier than its reputation suggests. The final pages are a short scene with two officials from a Japanese ministry who have come to ask what happened to the ship, and that scene is the reason this book belongs on this list at all.

Two illusionists in late Victorian London begin with a professional grudge and turn it into a lifelong project of sabotage. The novel is assembled from their journals, wrapped in a modern frame where their descendants meet. Priest is very good on the working mechanics of stage magic, the pledge and the turn and the part where the magician has to bring something back, and he is even better on what a man will trade to keep an audience. The book is colder and stranger than the film taken from it, and it goes somewhere the film only half follows. Knowing the film is no protection here.

Teddy Daniels and his new partner land on an island off Boston in 1954 to investigate a woman who has vanished from a locked room. The staff are polite and useless, the storm cuts the island off, and Teddy's own reasons for taking this particular case are not clean. Lehane writes atmosphere the way other people write plot: wet stone, cigarette smoke, the pharmaceutical calm of a ward at night. It moves quickly and it plays rough, and the sense that something is off starts early enough that an attentive reader gets a fair shot at it.

A guest at an English country house has to solve a murder that happens every evening, and he wakes each day inside a different body with different limits: one host is heavy and slow, one is a doctor, one is a bully everybody flinches from. Eight days, eight hosts, one killer, and a rule that he cannot leave until he names the right person. It is Agatha Christie put through a very odd machine, and the first fifty pages are disorienting on purpose. Keep a note of the names on your phone. The book expects you to work, and it does pay you back.

Camille Preaker is a journalist with a drinking problem and scars she keeps covered, sent home to Wind Gap, Missouri, to report on two dead children. Home means her mother, a house of soft carpets and hard rules, and a half sister she hardly knows. Flynn's first novel is shorter and uglier than Gone Girl, and it cares far more about what women do to each other inside families than about the murders. The whodunit itself is only competent. The house is the horror. It is a slim book and it leaves a mark that lasts longer than the page count suggests.

A rich man's son who walked free from a murder charge is himself shot at a party in Delhi, and six people present are found with a pistol: a bureaucrat, a film actress, a tribal man from the Andamans, a small time thief, an American, and a politician. Swarup gives each of them a whole life before the night in question, so the book reads like six short novels that agree to meet in the last hundred pages. It is broad, satirical and openly furious about who in this country gets away with what. The final section rearranges everything you have read.

Cadence Sinclair Eastman belongs to a family that owns an island off the Massachusetts coast and treats visible emotion as a form of bad manners. She was hurt somehow during summer fifteen, and nobody will tell her how. The prose is clipped and stylised, full of white space and metaphors that go slightly too far, because the narrator is a teenager who genuinely thinks in that register. It is short enough for one evening on a train. The last thirty pages are the reason people press this book into your hands and then stand there watching your face.

Christine wakes each day believing she is in her twenties. She is forty seven, married to a man she does not recognise, and a doctor she is not supposed to mention has told her to keep a journal and hide it. The novel is mostly that journal, which means every chapter has to rebuild the same ground while adding one new brick. That structure should be tedious and Watson keeps it moving, largely because the dread comes from you knowing more than the narrator ever can. It was a first novel and the dialogue shows it.

Louise is divorced, tired and drinking a little more than she admits. She meets David in a bar, discovers he is the new psychiatrist at the practice where she works, and is then befriended by Adele, his wife, who seems to need a friend very badly indeed. The book alternates between the two women and keeps the marriage deliberately out of focus. For most of its length it is a competent, airless domestic thriller about a triangle. Then it does the thing that made it famous, and the internet spent the next year arguing about whether that thing was allowed.

Lowen Ashleigh is out of money and out of options when she is hired to finish a hugely successful series whose author, Verity Crawford, can no longer write. The job means moving into the family home to sort through Verity's notes, where the husband is grieving and attentive and the office holds a manuscript that reads like a confession. Hoover writes it fast and hot, with a lot of sex and a lot of dread, and it is really a romance wearing a thriller's coat. It first appeared as a self published edition in 2018 and was picked up for a wider release later.