While You Wait for Gone Girl

I just finished Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, the plotty thriller that everyone and their brother has a hold on this summer. No spoilers: it's as good as they say it is, keep it on your list! Here are some lesser-known titles to tide you over until your hold arrives.

Last year's must-read plot twist novel was Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson. Reminiscent of Memento, the main character wakes up every morning missing most of her memory. She sees a forty-something in the mirror, but the last thing she remembers is being a twenty-something college student. This is not her beautiful house, and certainly not her beautiful husband. If you haven't read it yet, now is the perfect chance to peer into her diary as she tries to piece together the missing years. Read on for more ominous thrillers!

So Long, See You Tomorrow

First, I want to emphatically state that I never pick reading material to complement my geographical location. Yet before heading to farmland in the Heartland, I grabbed this drama played out between tenant farmers in the 1920's and then it grabbed me while I lazed away an afternoon on the porch of a 1910 Sears Roebuck Modern Home.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell is a telescopic look into a tragedy that claimed the lives of two neighboring farmers. Fifty years after the incident a townie, connected to the deaths through his friendship with the killer's son, reflects on the events that unfolded to culminate in murder and the families' fragmentation.