Lucy Foley, the author of “The Guest List,” recommends books about the most intimate of dramas, including twisty mysteries and all-time favorites like “Rebecca” and “Gone Girl.”

The illustration shows geometric fragments of eight book covers and one black-and-white author photo on a light blue background. What is it about marriages that makes them enduringly fertile material for the thriller treatment? Is it that we’re all incurably curious about the lives of others? Is it the schadenfreude of learning that an outwardly perfect union is anything but? Perhaps it’s the fascinating, unnerving suggestion that there may be secrets — terrible, life-upending secrets — even within the sanctuary of a person’s home and at the heart of this most intimate of relationships. In any case, this is a subgenre of psychological suspense that has gone on to spawn its own sub-subgenres — the wife/husband “before,” the gaslighting spouse, the couple intent on destroying one another — and it shows no sign of releasing its hold on readers’ imaginations. Here are some of my favorite matrimonial thrills, recent and vintage. The List By Yomi Adegoke “The List” starts with a horrifying premise: what if the man you loved, with whom you were planning to spend the rest of your life, suddenly appeared on a leaked social media list of abusers, forcing you to question everything you thought you knew about him. This is technically a pre-marriage thriller (the protagonists, Ola and Michael, are engaged), but it is nonetheless a fascinating and nuanced exploration of how little it takes to completely upend two lives, and of the gray areas inherent to this sort of online shaming. Rebecca By Daphne du Maurier We’ve all felt it, no? The curiosity about a lover’s previous partners? In the time before social media stalking, one had to get creative to sate one’s unhealthy curiosity: communing with the palpable presence haunting one’s new marital home, interrogating obsessively loyal domestic servants and investigating a dilapidated boathouse full of eerie clues. In this glorious, gothic portrayal of a marriage of unequals, the presence of the first Mrs. de Winter eclipses our protagonist’s sense of self so entirely that we never even learn the narrator’s name. This is the book that spawned an entire subgenre of domestic […]

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