Sarah Pearse is best known for atmospheric thrillers that pair eerie, isolated settings with tightly wound suspense. With bestselling novels like The Sanatorium and The Retreat, she has built a reputation for stories that are both immersive and unnerving.
If you enjoy Sarah Pearse’s blend of tension, secrets, and striking locations, these authors are well worth adding to your reading list:
Lucy Foley excels at locked-room-style mysteries set in remote, glamorous, and deeply uneasy locations. Her novels peel back layers of conflict and buried resentment, revealing how quickly a polished gathering can turn dangerous.
In The Guest List, Foley stages a lavish wedding on a remote Irish island, where old grudges and hidden motives begin to surface with deadly consequences.
Ruth Ware writes suspenseful thrillers that combine modern psychological tension with the feel of a classic mystery. She is especially good at taking a seemingly ordinary premise and letting dread build until it becomes impossible to look away.
Check out The Woman in Cabin 10, a tense thriller set aboard a luxury cruise, where Lo Blacklock sees something shocking and soon realizes no one else believes her account.
Shari Lapena is known for fast-paced domestic thrillers packed with twists, suspicion, and family secrets. Her stories expose the cracks beneath outwardly normal lives, making everyday relationships feel suddenly unstable.
The Couple Next Door is a perfect example: after a couple’s baby vanishes during a dinner party next door, lies and suspicion spread through their family and neighborhood.
B.A. Paris focuses on psychological thrillers driven by toxic relationships and the dark truths hidden behind respectable appearances. Her clean, direct prose keeps the tension moving forward while the unease steadily deepens.
Behind Closed Doors follows Jack and Grace, a seemingly perfect couple whose enviable life conceals something far more disturbing.
Clare Mackintosh writes emotionally charged thrillers that balance mystery with grief, trauma, and hard-earned resilience. Her books tend to be both suspenseful and character-driven, which makes the revelations hit even harder.
In I Let You Go, Mackintosh explores one woman’s attempt to rebuild after tragedy, only to show how the past refuses to stay buried.
Alice Feeney is a strong choice for readers who enjoy twist-heavy psychological suspense. Her novels often play with memory, perception, and unreliable narration, creating an atmosphere where nothing feels entirely secure.
Fans of Sarah Pearse's atmospheric tension will enjoy Feeney's Rock Paper Scissors, a sinister weekend-getaway thriller filled with deception, misdirection, and secrets.
Riley Sager writes chilling thrillers that sit at the edge of mystery and horror. His books are ideal for readers who like unsettling houses, buried histories, and stories that maintain a strong sense of menace throughout.
For readers who appreciated Sarah Pearse's secluded and eerie settings, Sager's Home Before Dark is an excellent pick—a novel about a supposedly haunted mansion and the truths waiting inside it.
Stacy Willingham creates psychological thrillers centered on damaged families, buried trauma, and characters haunted by what they cannot fully understand. Her writing leans into emotional depth without losing momentum.
Willingham's debut novel A Flicker in the Dark draws on dark family history to build an intense, unsettling thriller with plenty of mystery and tension.
Gilly Macmillan writes layered thrillers that blend family drama, emotional realism, and steadily escalating suspense. Her novels are often driven as much by relationships and vulnerability as by the mystery itself.
Try What She Knew is a tense and affecting story about a mother searching for her missing son while suspicion falls on those closest to her.
Tana French is renowned for psychological mysteries that dig deeply into character, motive, and memory. Her work is more literary in style, but it still delivers the tension and emotional complexity that Sarah Pearse fans often appreciate.
French's In the Woods follows an investigator confronting a current murder case that may be tied to the traumatic event that shaped his childhood.
Megan Miranda writes sharp, suspenseful thrillers about small-town secrets, fractured friendships, and the darkness hidden beneath familiar routines. She has a knack for creating stories where trust is always in short supply.
In her novel All the Missing Girls, she tells the story in reverse, giving the central disappearance an extra layer of intrigue and tension.
Catherine Ryan Howard is known for inventive thriller premises, strong pacing, and clever structural choices. Her books often take familiar suspense elements and sharpen them into something fresh and unsettling.
Her novel 56 Days unfolds during pandemic lockdown, tracing the story of a new couple whose secrets become increasingly dangerous as their lives close in around them.
Wendy Walker’s thrillers explore trauma, memory, and the uncertainty of perception. She builds her stories around emotionally complex characters, leaving readers to question what is true and who can really be trusted.
In All Is Not Forgotten, Walker delivers an unsettling psychological thriller about lost memories and the disturbing lengths others will go to in order to protect—or control—a victim.
Alex Michaelides writes psychologically intense thrillers with high-concept hooks and a strong sense of dramatic tension. His stories often rely on unstable perspectives and tightly guarded secrets to keep readers off balance.
His popular novel The Silent Patient follows a woman who stops speaking after a violent crime and the therapist determined to uncover the truth behind her silence.
C.J. Tudor blends suspense, mystery, and a touch of horror to create stories that feel both familiar and unnerving. She is especially effective at turning ordinary settings and old memories into something deeply unsettling.
Her novel The Chalk Man centers on childhood friends, long-buried secrets, and the lingering trauma that follows them into adulthood.
