Heart-Pounding Thrillers with a Mother's Love at the Core

All of Gillian’s novels have an element of motherhood nestled inside, but this one in particular stuck with me!

22-year-old Olivia has been missing for one day… and counting. She was last seen on CCTV, entering a dead-end alley. Julia, the detective heading up the search thinks she knows what to expect, but has no idea just how close to home this case is going to get…

I completely fell in love with Julia; a mother and hard-working detective who will do anything to protect those she cares about. Intense, unnerving and perfectly paced.

This was one of my top reads of the year back in 2022. It’s a dark domestic drama that ticks every single box, with an ending that’ll have you thinking for months.

We meet Emily, wife to Simon, mother to her one-year-old, Bonnie. Their cat, Oscar, has been missing for days and Emily is getting increasingly worried about his whereabouts. She also has an intense feeling that they’re being watched. When Emily gets a call from a woman named Anna, who claims she’s found missing Oscar, the pair become friends. But is Anna too good to be true?

Glamorous, beautiful Mummy has everything a woman could want… except for a daughter of her own. So when she sees Kim – heavily pregnant, glued to her phone and ignoring her eldest child in a busy shop – she does what anyone would do. She takes her. Mummy and Kim have more in common than they could possibly have imagined, and five-year-old Tonya is caught in the middle…

Though tough to stomach, this  book is written with incredible talent and passion, with a unique tone and fantastic character development. It’s impossible not to feel every emotion and suffer right alongside. Unforgettable and thought-provoking.

This is a brilliant debut novel, a suspenseful, slow-burn thriller that is much darker than it appears on the surface.

Iris and her family have just moved into number 23 Riddleston Road, the house of dreams. But they shouldn’t be there. Not after what Iris did to get her hands on it… But when you’re desperate to give your child everything he needs, everything he could want, you’d do anything… surely?

I loved how this book explores motherhood and the intensity of a mother’s love. The fact that Iris’s love knows no bounds when it comes to her son. There is always a building tension, the emotional parts so raw and at times, relatable. And those solid twists are unforgettable! Stunning writing and a joy to experience. 

This book is one that throws you off course constantly and absolutely wows you at the end.

Five-year-old Ava Boone has been missing for six months. There have been no leads, no arrests, no witnesses. The only suspect is quiet, middle-aged Leland Ernest. Grace Wright has just bought the house next door. Recently divorced, Grace uprooted her two small children to start again and hopes the move will reset her crippling insomnia. But now she understands the bargain-price for her beautiful new house…

Obsession, motherhood and an intense desire to protect is explored so deeply in this book. The ultimate binge-worthy thriller!

This book was an instant hit when it was released in 2021. Meet Blythe Connor, a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for, and everything she feared. Regardless, she is determined to be the best mother to her new baby Violet — a role-model mother unlike her own. But she soon becomes convinced that there’s something amiss … or is it all in her head?

When Leah was editor of her local paper, two teenage girls went missing. Hope was middle-class and white, from a perfect nuclear family. Tilly was a black girl from a council estate – and a habitual runaway. Leah made the decision to put Hope on the front page, and she was found the next day. Tilly got a small mention on page 18, and was never seen again. Sixteen years on, strange things begin to happen and Leah's past comes back to haunt her… she wants to protect her son and her family. But do they believe what she tells them?

This is one of those books you want to reread as soon as you finish to see if you can spot the things you missed out on before! Superb, relatable characters and such a mysterious backstory.