Books like The Good Girl
What should you read after Mary Kubica’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Mary Kubica
- 2014
- Psychological thriller
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Good Girl
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Three women's accounts of the same disappearance, none of them reliable, all of them nursing a private disaster. Kubica's structure with the memory holes turned up.
- Narrators you can't trust
- Rotating points of view
- Before and after chapters
- Alcoholic narrator, bleaker mood
Best for the reversalGone Girl
Gillian Flynn
The book that made every thriller since restructure itself around a mid-book betrayal of the reader. If the reveal is what you loved, this is the purest version of it.
- A last-page reversal
- Narrators you can't trust
- Rotating points of view
- Both leads are unpleasant
Great matchThe Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides
A woman who will not speak and a man determined to know why — Kubica's captor-and-captive intimacy relocated to a psychiatric ward, with a final page built to detonate.
- A last-page reversal
- Captor and captive blurring
- A kidnapping that isn't what it seems
- Single narrator, tighter focus
Best for the memory gapsBefore I Go to Sleep
S.J. Watson
Christine wakes each morning with no past, rebuilding her life from a notebook and the word of a man who may be lying to her. Mia's amnesia, stretched across a whole novel.
- Narrators you can't trust
- Captor and captive blurring
- Before and after chapters
- Repetitive by design
Great matchThe Woman in the Window
A.J. Finn
A shut-in whose testimony nobody believes, including the reader, and a crime that may be entirely inside her head. Same pleasure of doubting your own narrator.
- Narrators you can't trust
- A last-page reversal
- Very short chapters, thin prose
Great matchBig Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
Moriarty builds toward a death she tells you about on page one, filling the gap with school-gate gossip and one marriage that is far worse than it looks from outside.
- Cold, wealthy families
- Before and after chapters
- Rotating points of view
- Comic in tone much of the time
Great matchThe Couple Next Door
Shari Lapena
A baby taken during a dinner party next door, two parents who both behave oddly afterwards, and family money quietly bending everyone's choices. Pure Kubica territory.
- A kidnapping that isn't what it seems
- Cold, wealthy families
- A mother refusing to stop
- Flat, functional prose
Best for the structural trickThe Wife Between Us
Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen
Written by two authors specifically to make you misread who is who — the sort of reveal that sends you back thirty pages to work out how you were fooled.
- A last-page reversal
- Narrators you can't trust
- Cold, wealthy families
- Second half loses tension
Worth a look — with a warningBehind Closed Doors
B. A. Paris
The most literal version of the captivity you found in Kubica: a marriage that is a prison, told in alternating past and present until you can hardly breathe.
- Captor and captive blurring
- Before and after chapters
- Sustained psychological abuse
Great matchThe Last Mrs. Parrish
Liv Constantine
Two women, one very rich husband, and a first half that turns out to have been the wrong story entirely. Cold money and colder people.
- Cold, wealthy families
- A last-page reversal
- Rotating points of view
- Soapy, indulgent plotting
Great matchThe Girl Before
J.P. Delaney
Two women, one severe house and one landlord with rules, in chapters alternating between Then and Now in exactly the rhythm Kubica uses.
- Before and after chapters
- Captor and captive blurring
- Narrators you can't trust
- Premise stretches credulity
Great matchThe Lying Game
Ruth Ware
Ware writes the other half of the Kubica formula: less interested in the abduction than in the women who spend fifteen years managing what they know.
- Narrators you can't trust
- A mother refusing to stop
- Rotating points of view
- Much slower burn
Worth a look — with a warningSharp Objects
Gillian Flynn
For the mother-daughter poison running underneath Kubica's plot. Flynn writes a wealthy family closing its doors with a viciousness that stays with you for weeks.
- Cold, wealthy families
- A mother refusing to stop
- Self-harm depicted throughout
What should you read after The Good Girl?
The Good Girl by Mary Kubica works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins — three women's accounts of the same disappearance, none of them reliable, all of them nursing a private disaster. Kubica's structure with the memory holes turned up.
If what stayed with you was a last-page reversal, read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn instead: the book that made every thriller since restructure itself around a mid-book betrayal of the reader. If the reveal is what you loved, this is the purest version of it. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is the other strong option — a woman who will not speak and a man determined to know why — Kubica's captor-and-captive intimacy relocated to a psychiatric ward, with a final page built to detonate.
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