Books Like Behind Closed Doors: 9 Thrillers About Marriages You Can’t Leave

On December 29, 2015, England and Wales made it a crime to control someone’s life. According to Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, a person commits an offence if they “repeatedly or continuously” engage in controlling or coercive behaviour toward someone they are personally connected to. No bruises required. To make any coercion an official crime, there needs to be proof of a repeated or continuous pattern. Only six weeks later, Behind Closed Doors by author B.A. Paris came out, a book specifically focused on this type of crime.

I remember in high school, my boyfriend (an idiot) told me I was “bad at making friends”. Not in some dramatic, movie-villain monologue, just casually, regularly, like he was being helpful. He meant the world to me and I loved him, so I believed him. But by telling me I wasn’t good at connecting with others, it actually made me more dependent on him. I started relying on him more for my social life. I felt more isolated from everyone around me because I genuinely believed they didn’t like me. So I clung tighter to the person who was making me feel that way. That was my first real lesson in the power of gaslighting.

The lesson here is: there is no better way to control someone than to convince them that they can’t trust themselves. I couldn’t see it while it was happening. And at some point in our lives, most of us can relate to this in some way. That’s why we relate to and turn to coercive control books; they make us reflect on when we’ve let people control us in our own lives. Here’s a list of books like Behind Closed Doors that have a similar theme:

Why Is Everyone Still Talking About Behind Closed Doors?

Because it is usually where people start on the perfect marriage thrillers shelf, it is the first of the B.A. Paris books most readers pick up, and the premise refuses to date. The book is set “[b]ehind the facade of a perfect English marriage,” where “a woman is held prisoner by her dashing husband,” and Jack keeps Grace locked in the house in Spring Eaton. Jack is an attorney who specializes in defending battered women. He is the person a woman in Grace’s position would be sent to.

Grace has a younger sister, Millie, who has Down syndrome, and Millie is the reason Grace stays in the house. The dinner party guests see a devoted husband and a beautiful home, while Grace is quietly planning her escape right in front of them. The book has sold over two million copies in the US and UK, and Robert Schwentke was attached to direct a film adaptation in 2019, with no release confirmed since.

The crime in this book is also a crime people are being charged with right now. Police in England and Wales recorded 49,557 coercive control offences per year (March 2024-2025). That number only counts the cases that made it to a police report, so the real figure is higher. That’s part of why this book still sells: a lot of readers recognize these moves from their own relationships.

How I Picked These Books

Growing up in the town where they shot The Stepford Wives, I was surrounded by married couples with uneven power structures. That’s what inspired me to both write and read controlling husband thrillers. My criteria for the books like Behind Closed Doors includes:

1. You see the walls closing in: You watch your main character slowly succumb to the control, scared for them, but understanding how realistically they could get into such a predicament. Grace signs up for a honeymoon. Audrey drives out to a farm for one night. Nobody gets kidnapped in chapter one, because why we like these styles of thrillers is because we can relate to what the characters are going through and believe they would make the choices they did.
2. From the outside, nobody believes them: Whatever the neighbours, the followers or the police think is going on in there, it is not what is actually happening. Jack and Grace throw dinner parties. McKinley’s farm has a huge online following. Beth’s husband in Dear Wife is a man nobody suspects. The manipulator is really good at what they do, so oftentimes the protagonist, and everyone around them, are in denial.
3. The protagonist is logical: She notices, she counts, she tests a door. You believe the main character is smart and logical, but understand how this could still happen to them. After all, there’s nothing I hate more than thinking my protagonist is stupid and the author is just making them do things for the sake of the story.

The 9 Best Books Like Behind Closed Doors

1. Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough (2017)

Louise is a single mother working part-time in a psychiatrist’s office. She sleeps with her new boss David, then finds herself befriending his wife Adele, and ends up “inevitably caught in their web of lies and deceit.” Take it if you want the Jack-and-Grace setup told from outside the house, by a woman who is being handed the pieces one at a time.

Pinborough makes the controlling husband socially excellent, the same move Paris makes with Jack. David is a psychiatrist, and Louise likes him before she knows anything. The book came out in 2017 from HarperFiction in the UK and Flatiron in the US. The novel is famous for its ending, it was marketed with its own hashtag, #WTFThatEnding, and the subway ads told readers “DON’T TRUST THIS BOOK.” The six-episode Netflix limited series stars Simona Brown as Louise, Tom Bateman as David and Eve Hewson as Adele. Read the book before somebody spoils the ending for you, because somebody will.

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2. Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest (2025)

I wrote Perfect Modern Wife because I kept having the same conversation over and over: friends out-earning their partners and still doing all the cooking and cleaning when they got home wrecked. That attitude is getting younger, not older. According to a King’s College London study of 23,000 people, almost one in three Gen Z men agree a wife should always obey her husband, compared to a little more than one in ten Baby Boomer men. That means Gen Z men are more than twice as likely to say it. Meanwhile my high school homecoming king married one of the most famous farm tradwife influencers in the country. Here’s my take on it:

In the book, executive Audrey drives out to check on her friend Jessica at a wellness retreat run by their estranged friend-turned-tradwife-influencer McKinley. She expects green juice. Instead she finds McKinley crawling across the kitchen floor at 3 AM, hands raw and bleeding, chanting about being the “perfect modern wife.” It’s a survive-the-night short story you can finish in one sitting, part The Stepford Wives and part Midsommar. McKinley’s retreat has paying customers, which means the women there signed up for the control.

Goodreads reviewer Dea Farrell described the turn like this: “McKinley has gone from wild partying pizza loving friend to smiley, organic foods, cleaning machines, and perfect wife.” The whole novella is free right now.

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3. Sleeping with the Enemy by Nancy Price (1987)

Sara Burney is “an abused, submissive and battered wife whose daily goal has been to keep her brutish husband Martin from still more violent assaults…” She is swept overboard from a sailboat in Manhasset Bay, presumed drowned, and takes the opening: she rides a bus to Cedar Falls, Iowa, and becomes Laura Pray. That’s the escape half of the story. Grace spends her book inside the house; Sara spends hers on a bus.

Simon & Schuster published this in April 1987, twenty-eight years before England and Wales got around to writing the behavior into law. Most of the controlling husband thrillers on this list are doing a version of what Price did with Sara. The novel and the film split here. The 1991 film has Julia Roberts stage the drowning; in the book Sara is “presumed dead when she is swept overboard from a sailboat in Manhasset Bay,” seizing “the opportunity to escape.” Being handed the accident and choosing not to come back is a colder thing for a character to do. Publishers Weekly called it in 1987: “Reveries, dreams and images of drowning form an effective counterpoint to chilling scenes of observation and pursuit.”

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4. The Girl Before by JP Delaney (2017)

The setup is “[a] high-tech town house… leased by its control-freak architect to a series of women who look just like his dead wife,” and the tenancy comes with “about two hundred stipulations”: no books, no pets, no rugs, no cushions, nothing on the floor at any time, monitored by sensors, cameras and inspections. Emma and Jane narrate in alternating chapters. Take it if you want the rules written down, numbered, and enforced by a camera.

Delaney puts the control in a lease instead of a marriage, and a lease is a thing you sign on purpose, with a clause in it about how to leave. That’s the cleanest answer I know to “why didn’t she just leave.” The rules arrive one at a time, each one is small, and the house is stunning. The four-part BBC adaptation with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and David Oyelowo reached US viewers on HBO Max. And the man who wrote all those house rules publishes as JP Delaney and is really the English novelist Tony Strong.

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5. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (2014)

Somebody dies at a school fundraiser, and Moriarty then backtracks six months through the parents of one kindergarten class so you can work out who and why. Celeste is the one to watch: “slim, rich and beautiful, and her marriage to hedge fund manager Perry seems too perfect to be true; it is.” Take it if you want the Grace Angel dynamic among women who see her at pickup every single morning.

Celeste is the woman the other mothers envy, and that is the exact loneliness Paris is writing about. A domestic violence organisation went on the record about it: Allie Bones of the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence described the show as a realistic portrayal of domestic abuse, and pointed to the myth that the victim is never “an educated, career-focused, moneyed, woman like the one portrayed in this series.” Moriarty wrote that myth on purpose. Two seasons of the HBO adaptation ran in 2017 and 2019, and the first won eight Emmys.

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6. The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose

Sarah Morgan is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Washington, DC. Her husband Adam has been sleeping with Kelly Summers for almost two years. When Kelly’s body turns up at the couple’s lake house and Adam is arrested, Sarah takes the case herself. Take it if you want the lawyer-and-marriage collision that Behind Closed Doors only gestures at. It’s also the book people mean when they search books like The Perfect Marriage.

Paris makes her abuser a lawyer who defends battered women. Rose makes her heroine the lawyer and hands her the worst client of her life, so you spend the book watching a woman use her professional competence on the one relationship where it has never worked. That inversion is the reason it belongs here. Rose called it “my debut that should have never been in bookstores to begin with,” and Blackstone reissued it in a hardcover collector’s edition. A film has been in development since 2022 with Sigal Avin directing.

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7. Dear Wife by Kimberly Belle (2019)

Beth Murphy has “planned every detail of her departure meticulously; from her new name to her new appearance and car, she is leaving nothing to chance,” because “[h]e has trained her well through years of abuse, and she knows that he will find her…” Belle runs three points of view: Beth, a husband, and the detective looking for a missing woman. Take it for the logistics. This is the one that shows you the paperwork.

Belle has said where it came from. In an interview with The Nerd Daily, she said domestic violence “was inspired by a dear friend whose backstory is similar to my main character’s in Three Days Missing,” and that writing about it “helped me sort through all the emotions I felt, the sadness and helplessness and anger, while watching my friend go through her divorce.” That’s a different project from Paris’s, which is built to make you gasp. Belle spends her pages on the burner phone, the new car and the new name. That’s what a year of planning actually consists of.

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8. The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins (2021)

A “penniless young woman calling herself Jane” walks dogs in Thornfield Estates, a gated community in Birmingham, Alabama, and meets “dashing recent widower Eddie Rochester,” whose wife Bea went missing in a boating accident six months earlier, with her best friend Blanche, and was presumed drowned. Then Blanche’s body turns up with a skull fracture. Take it if you want your coercive control with the names spelled out for you.

It’s Jane Eyre in a subdivision, and Hawkins is not being subtle about it. Bertha in the attic is the original wife-you-can’t-leave, and Hawkins moves her to a gated Alabama subdivision to show how little the architecture has changed since 1847. The two trade reviewers landed in different places. Publishers Weekly called it “suspenseful” and praised “outsider Jane’s sharp-eyed take on the entitled ladies of Thornfield Estates,” while Kirkus ended its review with “[s]kip this one and read Wide Sargasso Sea instead.”

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9. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)

Victor Gollancz published it in London and Doubleday in New York in 1938. A young woman of no money marries the widower Maxim de Winter and arrives at Manderley, his manor on the Cornish cliffs, where the housekeeper Mrs Danvers runs everything in the first wife’s name. Take it to see where all of this started.

The narrator of this book has no first name. Nobody in it ever says one. Variety calls it “a conspicuous detail in du Maurier’s commentary on gender roles and the gross power imbalance in this particular marriage that her first name is never spoken.” Du Maurier gave that woman no first name in 1938, and eighty-eight years of domestic thrillers have not come up with a sharper way to say the same thing. Hitchcock’s 1940 version took eleven nominations and won Best Picture, the only Hitchcock film ever to do it. Ben Wheatley’s Netflix version arrived in 2020 with Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas.

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What to Read Next

Those are my nine books similar to Behind Closed Doors — the perfect marriage thrillers and coercive control books I hand people who ask. If you want the shorter answer, these are the controlling husband thrillers worth your Saturday. The part of the Paris novel that sticks with people is rarely the locked door. It is the moment Grace starts checking her own memory against Jack’s version of it. That has its own subgenre and I have a whole list of it. Go to gaslighting thriller books next. It’s nine novels about the thing my high school boyfriend was doing for free.

FAQ: Books Like Behind Closed Doors

What Are the Best Books Like Behind Closed Doors?

Pick the ones that put an enviable-looking marriage around a woman who is quietly working out how to get from the inside of it to the outside: Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough (the closest match, told from outside the house), Sleeping with the Enemy by Nancy Price (the 1987 original), The Girl Before by JP Delaney (the rules in writing), and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (where the whole subgenre comes from). Readers hunting books like The Perfect Marriage specifically should start with The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose itself. If you want the control to come from a retreat women pay to attend, read Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest. It’s the only one on this list you can finish in one sitting.

What Is Coercive Control, and Is It Actually a Crime?

In England and Wales, yes. According to Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, it is an offence to repeatedly or continuously behave in a controlling or coercive way toward someone you are personally connected to, where that behaviour has a serious effect on them. The Crown Prosecution Service puts the maximum penalty at five years’ imprisonment. The Office for National Statistics recorded 49,557 such offences by police per year (March 2024-2025).

Was Behind Closed Doors B.A. Paris’s First Book?

Yes. Of all the B.A. Paris books it is the one readers tend to arrive at first. Kirkus called it “an at times tense debut with a clever heroine caught in an overladen plot.” It came out in the UK on February 11, 2016, and in the US that August. It has since sold over two million copies across those two markets.

Is There a Behind Closed Doors Movie?

Not yet. Director Robert Schwentke attached to a film adaptation in December 2019, produced by Stone Village’s Scott Steindorff and Dylan Russell with Scott Delman and Ulf Israel. No distributor, cast or release date has been announced since. If you want the same marriage on screen now, the Netflix limited series of Behind Her Eyes is six episodes and covers similar ground.

What Should I Read Next If I Loved Behind Closed Doors?

Read a perfect-wife thriller you can finish in one sitting. Perfect Modern Wife is a short story set over one night at a tradwife influencer’s retreat, where the program promises to build a better wife, and it’s free for a limited time. Goodreads reviewer Heather put it this way: “The smiles are too practiced, the rules too precise, and that constant talk of ‘improvement’ starts to sound a lot like control.”

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