Authors Like Shari Lapena: 9 Thrillers Where the Nice Ones Are Lying

Shari Lapena has written ten suspense novels about what the neighbors are hiding, and the pull quote she runs on her own homepage is Ruth Ware saying no-one does suburban paranoia like Shari Lapena. Then you read her bio. She is a former lawyer and English teacher, and she writes the whole suburban-paranoia shelf full time from a farm in Ontario.

I have the neighbor she writes about. I write thrillers, and I grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut, a few towns over from Wilton, which is the town Ira Levin said inspired The Stepford Wives. So I came to this pre-loaded. But the clearest case is my family’s, and I wrote it up at the time in my list of Hamptons thriller books. Now as an adult, I have family who has a house out there. One of my family members is a very successful executive who worked her ass off to get a place in the Hamptons, so when I visit now it’s a bit more peaceful and about catching up with my loved ones. But even so, they have a crazy neighbor who they think snuck onto their property to call the police on them about installing some backyard landscaping (using indigenous plants, no less) too close to the edge of their property — and this isn’t even visible from the street. While the police said he couldn’t tell them which neighbor reported them for the $250 fine and court appearance, he hinted which side they should put cameras up to catch their neighbor if they tried to sneak onto their property again. Their solution (other than the cameras)? Grab drinks with another neighbor to get the gossip on the crazy neighbors. I mean, the stories write themselves.

So when I went looking for authors like Shari Lapena, I started with one rule: the lying had to come from inside the circle, not from a stranger. That alone cuts out most of the crime section. Then I added two more, and these nine are what came through.

What Makes an Author Feel Like Shari Lapena?

The crime happens inside the circle. In The Couple Next Door, a baby goes missing from a house while her parents are at a dinner party next door, and the suspect pool is the guest list. Nobody has to drive in from out of town. The people the police need to talk to were all a few feet away, holding a drink.

For me, the Lapena engine is that every version of events she gives you is plausible, and the people giving them to you are pleasant. That’s much harder to write than a villain. A villain tells the reader where to point. A neighbor who brings a casserole over and then lies about what time she went to bed makes you doubt your own judgment. That’s the state Lapena keeps you in for a whole book.

Why Is Everyone Talking About Shari Lapena Right Now?

Because there is a new one. Getting Away with Murder came out in the US on July 28, 2026, and Penguin Random House bills it as her tenth thriller. The setup is Jill and Ted, who adore their New York brownstone the way other people adore their children, and who work out that the death of one wealthy relative would solve everything. The publisher’s own jacket copy finishes on a run of conditions, starting with “as long as they trust each other,” which after nine previous books reads like a threat.

All of that started with the first book. According to The Bookseller, The Couple Next Door was named WHSmith’s Book of the Year for 2016, and WHSmith’s head of fiction Sandra Bradley is quoted in the same piece saying she was absolutely delighted about it. Her publisher now calls her a multimillion-copy internationally bestselling author, and every writer below is on the same shelf.

How I Picked These Authors

I read a lot of domestic suspense both because I love it and because I write in it, so I’m fussy about what counts as books like Shari Lapena. Here’s what each of these had to do:

1. The lying has to come from inside the house: a spouse, a friend, a sister, somebody down the street, or the narrator herself. No serial killer arriving from elsewhere. That way the dread is in the ordinary rooms you have to keep walking through, instead of somewhere you can lock a door against.
2. Somebody has to stay likeable while they lie to you: if the writer tips their hand early and lets you hate somebody by page nine, there’s nothing left to do but wait. I checked each of these for whether I was still giving the liar the benefit of the doubt halfway in, so that you get the full experience of being had.
3. You have to feel it pulling: short chapters, no throat-clearing, no hundred-page warm-up before the thing starts. I weighted pace hard, which is why eight of the nine are the kind of book that eats an evening. The ninth is the longest one here and earns every page of it.

The 9 Best Authors Like Shari Lapena (And Which Book to Start With)

1. Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen — Start With The Wife Between Us (2018)

The jacket copy on Pekkanen’s own page for the book spends its first lines telling you what you are about to assume: a jealous ex-wife, obsessed with the beautiful younger woman who is about to marry the man they both love. Then it tells you to assume nothing. Published by St. Martin’s on January 9, 2018. Start here if what you want from Lapena is the floor moving.

Two women writing one book together is why it works, because the seams never show, and you can never tell which of them just handed you the lie. Kirkus summed the surface premise up as an angry ex-wife stalking a young, innocent fiancee who is a carbon copy of her former self, and then added “or so it seems,” which is the whole book. Read it before somebody spoils it for you at a barbecue.

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2. Kristen Van Nest — Start With Perfect Modern Wife (2025)

What inspired me to write Perfect Modern Wife was finding myself having the same conversation over and over again: a lot of my friends were out-earning their male partners but still expected to do all the cooking and cleaning when they came home exhausted from work. And this is becoming even more common. According to a King’s College London study, one out of three Gen Z men agree a wife should always obey her husband, compared to only one out of ten Baby Boomer men. That means Gen Z men are twice as likely as Boomers to hold traditional views about decision-making in marriage, and 24% believe women shouldn’t appear “too independent or self-sufficient.” While all this was going on, my high school homecoming king married one of the most famous farm trad wife influencers.

In the book, successful executive Audrey visits her old friend Jessica at a wellness retreat run by their estranged friend-turned-#tradwife influencer McKinley. Audrey expects organic smoothies and sunset selfies. Instead, she finds McKinley crawling across the kitchen floor at 3 AM, hands raw and bleeding, chanting about being the “perfect modern wife.” As Laura Donovan, Business Insider writer and author, summed it up, this 53-page survive-the-night psychological thriller novella is: “Don’t Worry Darling meets Blink Twice meets… what could be the not so far off future under our current administration.”

It is on this list because the lying comes from Audrey’s own friend, and because McKinley is funny and warm the entire time she is doing it. One reviewer got the register better than my own jacket copy did: ★★★★★ “…the balance of psychological tension and dark humor makes the experience both chilling and entertaining.” — Sarah, Goodreads Reviewer.

It has been optioned by horror writer/director Joanna Tsanis to turn into a film. And if you want to read my book, lucky for you, I’m currently giving away this book like Shari Lapena for free. Get it before this promo ends!

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3. B.A. Paris — Start With Behind Closed Doors (2016)

Grace and Jack are the marriage everybody else in the room would like to have. Kirkus describes Jack as a chivalrous Prince Charming who dotes on Grace and on her younger sister Millie, who has Down syndrome, and then notes that he is a lawyer who specializes in defending battered women. Behind the facade of a perfect English marriage, a woman is held prisoner by her husband. St. Martin’s, August 9, 2016.

This is the purest version of the second thing on my list. Jack is charming in every scene he’s in, and the people around them aren’t idiots for believing him. That’s the part that gets you. It was Paris’s debut, and Deadline put its sales at over 2 million copies across the US and UK as of December 2019.

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4. Mary Kubica — Start With Local Woman Missing (2021)

Kubica’s own page lays out the sequence: Shelby Tebow is the first to go missing, then Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter Delilah vanish just blocks from where Shelby was last seen. Then the case goes cold, and eleven years later Delilah walks back into town. Kirkus dates it to Park Row Books, May 18, 2021. For readers who want the Lapena neighborhood with the timeline cut into pieces.

Kubica is the one I’d hand to somebody who has read all ten Shari Lapena books and is annoyed about running out. According to Kubica’s own site, her books have been translated into over thirty languages and sold over five million copies worldwide, which tells you the appetite for this exact shape isn’t a fluke. If you want the rest of her, I have a whole list of books like Mary Kubica.

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5. Samantha Downing — Start With My Lovely Wife (2019)

A body turns up in an abandoned Florida motel, and Publishers Weekly explains why that matters to the narrator: he and his wife Millicent abducted her, as a ploy to spice up their marriage. He relishes the idea of a suspicion-free killing spree right up until the motel body turns the whole arrangement into a problem. Berkley, March 26, 2019. For readers who want the Lapena dinner-party couple from the inside.

It’s the funniest book on the list, which is a strange thing to write about a book with a body count. Downing writes the logistics of a marriage (school pickup, tennis lessons, who is handling dinner) with the murders slotted in between them like errands, and the joke is that the domestic admin is clearly the harder part. It was her debut, and Deadline records it as a Best First Novel nominee for the 2020 Edgar Award.

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6. Liane Moriarty — Start With Apples Never Fall (2021)

Joy and Stan Delaney met as champion tennis players more than fifty years ago and ran a tennis academy until they retired. Joy disappears on February 14, 2020, and per Kirkus, the last text she sends her grown children is too garbled by autocorrect to decipher, and Stan refuses to accept there is a problem. Henry Holt, September 14, 2021, and Kirkus lists it as a New York Times bestseller at 480 pages.

Four adult children, four versions of their parents’ marriage, and you have to work out which sibling is describing the actual father. Moriarty writes mothers and neighbors and friends, all of whom have full interior lives, all of whom are partially complicit, and she makes you sit in the discomfort of recognizing yourself in one of them. Peacock released all seven episodes of its adaptation on March 14, 2024, with Annette Bening and Sam Neill as Joy and Stan.

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7. Clare Mackintosh — Start With I Let You Go (2016)

A boy called Jacob lets go of his mother’s hand on a wet Bristol road walking home from school and is killed by a driver who keeps going. Kirkus then follows Jenna, haunted by the death, as she pulls up stakes and moves to the tiny coastal town of Penfach in Wales. Berkley, May 3, 2016. For readers who want the twist that sends you straight back to page one.

The procedural half is the detectives working that hit-and-run with nothing to go on. The domestic half is where she breaks your ribs. Put it next to Behind Closed Doors and you can see the same trick from two angles: Paris keeps her liar in the room with you, Mackintosh keeps hers in the sentence structure. It won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016 — the award’s own past-winners list records it, and adds that her debut became a Sunday Times bestseller and a Richard & Judy book club winner.

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8. Ashley Audrain — Start With The Push (2021)

Blythe has a daughter, becomes convinced there’s something wrong with the child, and cannot get her husband to see it. The Washington Post, quoted on the publisher’s page, calls it a tense, chilling dip into the dark side of motherhood, narrated by Blythe, whose own upbringing raises the question of whether one can inherit an inability to parent. January 5, 2021.

The liar here might be the narrator, and you never get told either way. That’s the most Lapena thing about it. Maureen Corrigan, writing in the same paper, called it an ingenious reincarnation of that most forbidden of suspense narratives, the mommy-in-peril-from-her-own-monstrous-offspring. It won Best Crime Novel at the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in 2022. Don’t start it at 11pm.

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9. Alice Feeney — Start With Rock Paper Scissors (2021)

Per Feeney’s own jacket copy, screenwriter Adam Wright has lived with face blindness his whole life and can’t recognize friends, family, or his own wife. He and Amelia win a weekend away in Scotland. They didn’t randomly win the trip. One of them is lying. Flatiron Books, September 7, 2021.

Feeney is the showiest writer here, and the one most likely to make you say something out loud in public. Kirkus describes the structure: first-person chapters from Amelia and Adam interleaved with letters written to Adam on each anniversary, each one keyed to that year’s traditional gift. The letters are where the real marriage is. If she’s your speed, here are more books like Alice Feeney.

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What These Books Get Right About the People Next Door

The threat in these books has already been to your house. Millicent and her husband abducted Lindsay together. Joy Delaney’s four grown children all get the same garbled text. When the crime sits inside the circle like that, every question the main character asks costs her something socially long before it costs anybody anything legally. That’s the pressure Lapena built a career on.

Almost nobody in these books has an institution behind them. Jenna moves to Wales. Blythe’s husband says she’s imagining things. Audrey is at a retreat where they won’t let her see Jessica until it’s over. So when one of them wants a fact, she’s got to go ask somebody who has every reason to lie to her, in that person’s kitchen, and then drive home and decide alone whether she believed it.

And the neighbors in these novels are exactly right. Not villains. Just people with a view of your yard and an opinion about it. That’s the part I recognize from my family’s $250 landscaping fine, and it’s the part that makes domestic suspense worth reading and not just worth finishing. You close the book and look at your own street a little differently for about a day. If it’s specifically the nobody-believes-her part you’re here for, I built a whole list around that in my gaslighting thriller books round-up.

What to Read Next

If you want the next author rather than the next book, go to authors like Lisa Jewell — same trick of putting the danger inside a family that already eats together, nine writers, and the right book to start each one on.

FAQ: Authors Like Shari Lapena

Who Are the Best Authors Like Shari Lapena?

Start with Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, whose The Wife Between Us tells you to assume nothing, plus B.A. Paris, Mary Kubica, Samantha Downing, Liane Moriarty, Clare Mackintosh, Ashley Audrain and Alice Feeney. My own novella Perfect Modern Wife is number two on this list, so you know what to do with that. A reviewer described the setup in a way that fits half this shelf: “The premise is genuinely unsettling: a former friend turned #tradwife influencer running a picture-perfect wellness retreat that’s very clearly not about self-care.” — Taryn, Goodreads Reviewer.

In What Order Should I Read Shari Lapena Books?

They’re standalones, so there’s no required order and no series to catch up on. If you want the Shari Lapena books in order of publication, begin with The Couple Next Door in 2016 and end with Getting Away with Murder, which Penguin Random House dates to July 28, 2026 and calls her tenth thriller. If you want the best entry point instead, start with the debut and then jump to Not a Happy Family.

What Are the Best Books Like The Couple Next Door?

Local Woman Missing, because Kubica also builds the suspect pool out of people who wave at each other. For the version where the missing person is an adult and the family is the problem, take Apples Never Fall. For the one that most resembles the dinner-party premise of The Couple Next Door itself, My Lovely Wife puts you inside the marriage instead of across the street from it.

Which of These Have a Screen Adaptation?

One of them exists and you can watch it tonight: Peacock released all seven episodes of Apples Never Fall on March 14, 2024, with Annette Bening and Sam Neill. Several of the others were optioned at various points. Optioned isn’t made, though, and I’m not going to tell you a show is coming when the last trade report I can actually open is years old. Assume the rest are books for now.

Which of These Are Bleak and Which Are Funny?

My Lovely Wife is genuinely funny in a way that should worry both of us, and Rock Paper Scissors is the enjoyable one. I Let You Go and The Push are the two I wouldn’t read back to back, because one opens on a child’s death and the other keeps a mother in a house where nobody believes her. Behind Closed Doors is the claustrophobic one.

What If I Only Have One Evening?

Take Rock Paper Scissors or The Wife Between Us. Both move fast and both have a turn in them you’ll want to be awake for. Apples Never Fall is the one to save for a weekend, because at 480 pages it’s the longest book here. If what you actually want is more authors similar to Shari Lapena and not one more title, the first four entries above are the ones that sit nearest to her.

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