Memory-loss, voyeurism, and murrrderrrrr
There’s nothing I like more than an unreliable narrator. I love the sensation of being carried along by a character’s voice, trusting in their perspective like a good little reader, only to begin to notice discrepancies or contradictions in what they’re relating and what I can “see” going on around them with my keen and objective reader-eyes. Whether it’s a deliberate decision on the narrator’s part—telling a phony story to an audience they want to manipulate, or something like The Girl on the Train, where a character’s judgment is compromised by some cognitive impairment causing them to misconstrue what they see—it always makes the reader a more active participant in the emerging story as they try to sort through all the presented facts to get to the truth. Love it.
The Girl on the Train gets lumped in with Gone Girl a lot, and the readalike lists that already exist for these books have many overlapping titles. And that’s not a bad thing if you’re just interested in other psychological suspense novels with twists and characters you don’t quite trust, but in Gone Girl, the unreliable narrator bomb is dropped and then it becomes something altogether different, after which you can absolutely trust the narrator. And you’d better.
But with The Girl on the Train, the reader is kept spinning and spinning as new facts emerge, and literally every single character looks guilty at some point in the story, including and maybe especially, the diminished-capacity-by-way-of-blackout-drunken-episodes narrator.*
And for me, that’s the book’s selling point—the scramble to figure out whodunnit when you can’t trust anything you’re being told and, more specifically, the suspicion that your guide through the book may herself be guilty of the crime she’s ‘investigating.’
To that end, the list I have curated features characters who are accused of crimes they can’t remember if they’ve committed or not. And because that would become repetitive pretty quickly, I’ve also included a couple that feature crimes witnessed (or committed) by voyeuristic characters, and my one trademarked curveball title.
Trust no one, my friends…
* okay, technically there are THREE narrators, but you know who I mean
Having gone off the medication she takes to manage her bipolar disorder, a woman emerges from a manic episode to find that her friend has been murdered and she was the last person known to have seen her. She has no reliable memory of the afternoon, just hallucinatory flashes of images she’s not sure actually happened. Alcohol, Xanax and skipping your meds is the perfect recipe for becoming an unreliable narrator.
Following a car accident believed to be a suicide attempt, a woman suffering from amnesia is suspected of the murder of her ex-fiance, his new girlfriend, and the murder of her first husband 10 years ago. This one earns double unreliable narrator points, because not only does her amnesia affect the reader’s ability to understand what really happened, but the woman also lies her forgetful little butt off throughout.
This is a bit of an outlier, but is definitely for fans of the genre which its dreadful cover is not communicating AT ALL, so i’m here to correct that. I think this lists as YA, but it has strong appeal for adults. The misdirection here is more authorial than a result of faulty memory, but it’s a book of lies, unlikable characters, and nonlinear storytelling combining to make everyone look suspicious of murrrderrr.
Speaking of unlikable characters, this has a particularly bitter and snarky one. And maybe being wrongfully incarcerated for 10 years for the murder of her mother on a night she has no memory of would make anyone bitchy, but she was horrible even before prison, as readers will discover over the course of the book. An unreliable antihero you may not want to hang out with, but you’ll love seeing her get her answers.
The unreliable narrator in this book is like the voyeuristic mayor of creepytown. He’s an estate agent in a small English town who keeps the keys to every property in his realm close to hand, so he can snoop around when the residents are not home. He also passes down judgments on those who violate his moral code, and there will be punishments for wrongdoing. Deliciously chilling and full of secrets.
OK, this book doesn’t quite fit my declared intentions of “faulty memory-character accused of crime,” but it’s particularly strong memory-based psych suspense. A woman with multiple forms of amnesia who depends on her husband to get her through even the most basic challenges of the day begins to suspect he might be lying to her, leaving her completely helpless. Unreliable narrator with an unreliable spouse = kaboom!!
More literary fiction than mystery, as it’s character rather than plot-driven, this is about a woman with Alzheimer’s who is suspected of murdering her friend but has no memory of it. The whodunnit is a big part of the book, but it’s also about the frustration of having a mind you can’t control, the secrets that complicate friendship, and it has a fragmented structure that mirrors the character’s fragmenting mind.
A young man living on a tourist-destination island becomes obsessed with 2 vacationing couples, first just spying on them from a distance but then ingratiating himself into their lives. When one of them vanishes, there are many conflicting explanations and secrets, and no one can be trusted. This is more character-driven, with lots of dense description, but there are plenty of subtle reveals and dramatic situations.
This is one for the ‘voyeurism’ match, and it’s only for the first story (also published as It Had to Be Murder), which was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window. You’ve seen the movie, but you’ve probably never read the story (or even known it was based on a story). Peeping Tom scenario, crime, confusion—read it and detect the differences—no binoculars required.
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
More of a read-around than a readalike, but it’s my curveball offering: a memoir by a woman whose alcohol abuse led to an alarming number of forgotten evenings (and afternoons). And while she never woke to find herself accused of murder, she’s ‘come back’ into some weird situations. It recounts the blackout experience from someone who’s been there and is able to laugh about it now, but it’s also very…sobering. HA!
