Writing as Barbara Vine, crime novellist Ruth Rendell has produced some deeply unsettling and gripping standalone thrillers – the best of which is this dark tale of sisterly envy. It’s narrated by Faith, whose aunt Vera murdered her aunt Eden years before, and was hanged for it. What happened to bring death between these formerly loving sisters? Faith tells the story of the family and her secretive, fussy aunts, throughout the war and after, the secrets they shared, the lovers, and possibly even the child…

You should read it because it uses first-person voice so brilliantly, and is a great example of a narrator who’s as much in the dark as we are, and also for how to do an unresolved crime ending which leaves us profoundly unnerved. You’ll be thinking and wondering about this book for years to come, and the impending sense of doom, carried on through twenty years of narration, is expertly done.

The plot of The Constant Gardener is, on paper, like that of a typical thriller. Justin Quayle, a diplomat based in Nairobi, has a young and beautiful wife, Tessa. When she’s found murdered along with a younger man, Justin realises he knew very little about her life. As he tries to untangle the web she’s left for him, he discovers she was investigating a big chemical company, who will stop at nothing to cover up Tessa’s research.

As Justin’s chase takes him all over Africa, America, and Europe, you’d be forgiven for thinking this sounds like any thriller. What makes it different is the remarkable use of voice and viewpoint, the density of detail, and the recreation of grief and memory on the page. Read it to see how dense, beautiful prose can still be gripping, and how the thriller-plot structure can be elevated to something unique and special.

Mo Hayder’s first stand-alone novel was published in 2004. Its main protagonist is Grey, a traumatised young woman who moves to Tokyo to track down an expert in the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War, for reasons unexplained. She then gets caught up in some extremely grisly events. Her narrative is intercut with the memories of the academic, who was living with his pregnant wife in Nanjing, China, as the Japanese army came inexorably closer.

You should read it because: it’s a brilliant example of an unreliable narrator, who is too disturbed to really think about what happened to them; it’s very moving while also being visceral, gory, and in parts terrifying; it’s a great example of how to use two narratives to create tension.