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In Sarah Pekkanen’s new thriller, The Women in White, a young health-care aide probes how four female participants in a 1964 parapsychology experiment suddenly vanished. Below, the best-selling author names books that influenced her as she developed the story.
‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote (1966)
In his masterwork, Capote delved deeply into the reporting of the murder of a Kansas family. The result is a nonfiction book that reads like a novel. I love building my novels on a layer of bedrock truth so I can dig into reporting, which is exactly what I did with The Women in White. Buy it here.
‘Watchers’ by Dean Koontz (1987)
A crazy hit-man, a secret lab, and a brilliant golden retriever? These unlikely ingredients turn into a power-house thriller, one of Koontz’s best. Koontz, who is famously devoted to his dogs, delivers a book of nail-biting suspense that’s packed with emotion, illustrating how an expert blends genres. Buy it here.
‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn (2012)
Flynn delivers a knockout twist midway through this thriller about a picture-perfect young woman who has presumably been killed by her handsome husband. Aside from creating one of the best unreliable narrators in the genre, Flynn taught me a valuable lesson: Don’t save the twists for the end. Sprinkle them throughout your novel, and you’ll make it stronger. Buy it here.
‘The Anniversary’ by Alex Finlay (2026)
The architecture of this book is one of its many strengths. The stories of two high schoolers, Jules and Quinn, entwine on May 1, the day a serial killer attacks one of them. Jules survives, and the book continues across a decade, with chapters telling of the first of May each year, relentlessly building toward a surprising conclusion. Buy it here.
‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier (1938)
A young woman marries a handsome, wealthy widower and becomes obsessed with his deceased first wife. Along with a gripping plot, this Gothic novel explores the danger of perception versus reality, and how our own minds can become the most dangerous terrain of all, which is a theme I love to build into my thrillers. Buy it here.
‘Bright Young Women’ by Jessica Knoll (2023)
Knoll shifts the spotlight away from a real-life serial killer and onto his victims, imagining the unfulfilled promise of their lives while creating a fictional framework, one that focuses on the lost women. It’s brilliant, it’s compulsively readable—and it’s about time. Buy it here.