9 Authors Like Paula Hawkins

Fans of Hawkins’s twisting stories centered on complex women, fragmented memories, and an elusive search for the truth will get lost in Amy Tintera’s Listen for the Lie. The celebrated thriller centers on Lucy Chase, who remains haunted by a tragic episode from her past. Years ago, someone murdered Lucy’s best friend, Savvy. Afterward, Lucy was found smeared with Savvy’s blood but with no memory of what happened. Did Lucy kill Savvy that night? She can’t recall. But that hasn’t stopped everyone around her deciding she’s a murderer. As Lucy grapples with her guilt or innocence and tries to suppress the sinister thoughts that keep popping up in her head, a true crime podcast reopens Savvy’s case. Now Lucy must plunge back into the mystery of her best friend’s killing to try to solve it once and for all — even if it means discovering that she was the killer all along.

New York Times bestselling author Alex Michaelides will enthrall Hawkins fans with his psychological thrillers. Like Hawkins, Michaelides weaves paranoia and obsession into his work, delivering mind-bending narratives rich with delicious twists. For fans of The Girl on the Train, we recommend The Silent Patient, which takes seeming domestic bliss and pulls back the curtain to reveal the dark reality. Alicia and Gabriel appear to lead the perfect life — until Alicia shoots her husband five times in the face and then refuses to speak another word to anyone. Criminal psychotherapist Theo is determined to break through to his silent patient, but his search for the truth may reveal more than he anticipated.

Alexis Schaitkin is the critically acclaimed author of Saint X, as well as the darkly captivating Elsewhere, set to hit shelves in June 2022. Hawkins fans are sure to appreciate Schaitkin for her atmospheric storytelling, her flawed, dynamic characters, and her finely crafted plots. We recommend Saint X, an engrossing examination of grief and obsession that moves with the propulsive energy of a crime thriller. Years ago Claire’s older sister died under mysterious circumstances during a family vacation in the Caribbean. Now, as an adult, Claire runs into one of the men who was suspected — but eventually cleared — of being the killer, igniting a desperate search for the truth about who her sister was and what really happened to her.

Swedish author M.T. Edvardsson first hit U.S. shelves with his translated novel A Nearly Normal Family. Edvardsson’s narrative style is complex and clever, while his nuanced examination of layered domestic secrecy taps into the same double-life thrills found in The Girl on the Train. With A Nearly Normal Family, Edvardsson presents a knotty thriller about a family pushed to their limits that Hawkins fans will devour. In it an 18-year-old girl is accused of murder. Now her parents must decide just who’s telling the truth and how far they’re willing to go to protect their daughter.

Fans of Hawkins are going to love Jean Hanff Korelitz for her complex characters and twisty storylines. A New York Times bestselling author, Korelitz has written several popular novels, including Admission and You Should Have Known, which was adapted into the HBO series The Undoing. We included Korelitz’s The Plot on our list for its brilliant turns and characters that inhabit the morally gray spaces. Stephen King recommends it as well, hailing the novel as “insanely readable.” When a cocky MFA student with a surefire book idea turns up dead, his writing professor just can’t let the plot go to waste … so he takes the novel-in-progress and claims it as his own. At first, things go swimmingly for the professor, until an anonymous email shatters his stolen success: “You are a thief.” When you finish Korelitz’s celebrated literary thriller, get your hands on the author’s next novel, The Latecomer, which hits shelves on May 31, 2022.

Gillian Flynn is the award-winning author of three blockbuster thrillers: Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl. Any one of these novels will deliver a satisfying read for Hawkins fans, as each narrative boasts complex characters, expertly calibrated plots, and artful twists. We recommend Gone Girl for its thrilling tale of secrets and manipulation told from the perspective of multiple unreliable narrators. Amy and Nick are about to celebrate their fifth anniversary when Amy disappears. The evidence — including Amy’s diary — seems to point to Nick as the culprit. But is his increasingly erratic behavior a sign of guilt, panic, or something else entirely?

Writing duo Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen are the New York Times bestselling authors of four celebrated thrillers. The authors specialize in psychological suspense that keeps you guessing all the way through, and their smart conclusions are sure to please Hawkins fans. If you loved The Girl on the Train, we recommend The Wife Between Us. It might seem like a classic love-triangle story about a jealous ex-wife, but nothing is as it appears in this brilliant domestic thriller of obsession, love, and dangerous truths.

B.A. Paris is an internationally bestselling author with a Hawkins-like command of magnetic characters and shocking twists. Any of the author’s novels is sure to satisfy, from Behind Closed Doors to The Breakdown. For this list, we suggest Bring Me Back. Finn and Layla depart on their dream vacation, but only Finn returns. Ten years later, Finn has moved on and is engaged to Layla’s sister. But Layla may no longer be missing, and if she never truly vanished, then what secrets has Finn been hiding about her disappearance? In its starred review, Publishers Weekly says, “fans of intelligent psychological suspense will be richly rewarded” by Paris’ Bring Me Back. We agree.

Ruth Ware has written several top-notch psychological thrillers that Hawkins fans will enjoy. The bestselling author combines suspenseful prose and cunning plot twists to create unputdownable narratives that read like, well, “Agatha Christie got together with Paula Hawkins” (Stylist). The Woman in Cabin 10 is a prime example. A travel journalist takes a trip on a boutique cruise ship only to witness a woman being thrown overboard. Naturally, the journalist reports what she saw. There’s just one problem: All passengers are accounted for, and there’s no record of anyone missing from their cabin. Was she mistaken in what she saw? Or is she trapped at sea with a murderer?