Shari Lapena books are not all created equal, and I say that as someone who has read three of her thrillers. Lapena worked as a lawyer and an English teacher in Toronto before writing two literary novels that sold modestly, then pivoted to domestic suspense with The Couple Next Door in 2016, which went on to sell more than four million copies in over forty territories. All three Lapena thrillers I have read earned the same four stars from me. There is no standout and no letdown among them, which says something about what Lapena delivers book after book: reliability rather than surprise. I have not yet read her other six published thrillers, her two early literary novels, or Getting Away with Murder, her next book, arriving this month. Here is my honest ranking of the three I have read.
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena
The Couple Next Door (Pamela Dorman Books, August 2016) follows Anne and Marco Conti, who leave their baby, Cora, at home with a monitor while they attend a dinner party next door, checking in every half hour. When they return, Cora is gone. Detective Rasbach leads the investigation and senses within the first few questions that both parents are hiding something. He is right. A ransom demand, a business partner’s affair, and years of buried lies between Anne and Marco all surface before the truth about Cora’s disappearance comes out. Lapena’s suspense debut sold more than four million copies worldwide, became an instant New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller, reached number one on the UK Sunday Times list, and was a 2016 Goodreads Choice Award finalist. Detective Rasbach is one of the only characters Lapena has carried into a second book (he returns in A Stranger in the House, which I have not read yet). I gave The Couple Next Door four stars when I finally read it in 2021, five years after it made Lapena famous, and the reveal about Marco still landed because his motive was planted early enough to hold up.
This one is for you if you want the book that explains why everyone was reading Shari Lapena in 2016. Find The Couple Next Door on Goodreads.
An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena
An Unwanted Guest (Pamela Dorman Books, August 2018) traps ten guests at Mitchell’s Inn, a remote lodge in the Catskill Mountains, when an ice storm cuts the power, the phone lines, and the roads out. The innkeeper and his teenage son are stuck there with them. A guest turns up dead at the bottom of the staircase the next morning, and by the time Sergeant Margaret Sorensen fights her way through the blocked roads to reach the inn, more bodies have appeared. Lapena drops the recurring detective from The Couple Next Door entirely here. An Unwanted Guest is her most direct Agatha Christie homage: a small, isolated cast, no way out, and a body count that keeps climbing before anyone can be ruled out. I read it in 2020 and gave it four stars, the same rating as The Couple Next Door, but for a different reason. The domestic-suspense premise of a marriage hiding a secret is gone here. What replaces it is pure whodunit mechanics, and Lapena manages the expanding suspect list better than most writers attempting the same structure.
This one is for you if you want Lapena’s version of a snowed-in Agatha Christie mystery. Find An Unwanted Guest on Goodreads.
Not a Happy Family by Shari Lapena
Not a Happy Family (Pamela Dorman Books, 2021) opens the morning after wealthy, controlling Fred Merton and his anxious wife, Sheila, are found murdered in their Brecken Hill mansion, hours after a tense Easter dinner with their three adult children. Rage-filled Dan, dermatologist Catherine, and purple-haired Jenna each stand to inherit a fortune, and each had a documented reason to want their parents gone. Lapena builds the entire suspect pool out of family members this time, not a spouse or a stranger, which makes the investigation as much about the Mertons’ decades of dysfunction as about the murders themselves. I read Not a Happy Family within weeks of its 2021 release and gave it four stars like the other two. It earns that rating for a different reason again: the family setting gives Lapena more characters to redirect suspicion through than either of the other two books, and the reveal holds up against that larger cast.
This one is for you if you want a whodunit where every suspect is related to the victims. Find Not a Happy Family on Goodreads.
If you are new to Shari Lapena, start with The Couple Next Door. It is still her most iconic book and the clearest introduction to what she does well: a seemingly perfect life that cracks open once money and buried secrets get involved. I have not yet read A Stranger in the House, Someone We Know, The End of Her, Everyone Here Is Lying, What Have You Done, or She Didn’t See It Coming, and her two early novels, Things Go Flying and Happiness Economics, are literary fiction rather than thrillers. Getting Away with Murder, her next book, arrives this month. If you want more domestic-suspense thrillers in the meantime, Riley Sager is worth a look. For more, my list of best thrillers for beginners covers where to start with the genre. Find me on Instagram and Goodreads — I’d love to know which one you read first.