This one mentions books. Book links may be affiliate links; if you buy through one we may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Details.
The bath is where thrillers belong. You are warm, immobile, and unreachable, and the only way out is to finish the chapter. It is also the one place where a book can be physically harmed by a plot twist, and so it gives us a measurement.
Here are five, ranked by how far the book went into the water when the twist landed. All tests conducted with a paperback, a Kindle in a sandwich bag, or both. For science.
5. In the Woods
In the Woods
Rob Ryan investigates a child's death in the same woods where, twenty years earlier, his two best friends vanished and he was found with blood in his shoes. Gorgeous, slow, and unresolved in a way that will annoy you for years.
Water damage: a corner. French writes thrillers the way other people write literary novels, slowly, with enormous attention to how people talk, and the bath went cold twice before I’d finished the first hundred pages. The twist is less a twist than a slow draining, and you will finish it, towel around you, furious, and buy the next one.
4. The Guest List
The Guest List
A celebrity wedding on a remote Irish island, told by five guests, each of whom has a reason. The lights go out, somebody dies, and you don't learn who until very late. Pure closed-circle pleasure.
Water damage: the bottom third, from a sudden sit-up. A wedding, an island, a storm, five narrators, a body, and a structure that withholds who died until the last act. It’s the modern country-house murder with better catering, and the moment the lights go out I moved so fast the bath moved too.
3. Dark Matter
Dark Matter
A man is abducted and wakes up in a life that is his and isn't. Science-fiction thriller with a two-page chapter habit and an ending that's quietly devastating about marriage.
Water damage: fully submerged Kindle, sandwich bag held. Chapters two pages long. A physicist abducted and dropped into a version of his life where he made the other choice. The thriller part is relentless; the part that got me was the quiet one, about what you’d give up to get back to a specific kitchen with a specific person in it. I read the last fifty pages in a cold bath because I couldn’t stop to run more hot.
2. The Silent Patient
The Silent Patient
Alicia shoots her husband five times and never speaks again. A psychotherapist becomes obsessed with making her talk. One of those endings people hand the book to friends for, wordlessly.
Water damage: dropped, retrieved, dried on a radiator, pages now wavy. A woman shoots her husband and stops speaking. A therapist decides he’s the one who’ll get her to talk. You’ll see the ending coming, or you’ll think you do, and then the last pages will do the thing, and the book will be in the water.
1. Gone Girl
Gone Girl
Amy disappears on her fifth anniversary and Nick does not look sad enough. The book that invented the modern domestic thriller, and the midpoint twist is still a trapdoor.
Water damage: total. The midpoint of this book is the most famous trapdoor in the genre, and I read it in the bath years ago, not knowing, and I made a noise, and the paperback went under, and it’s still on the shelf, swollen to twice its thickness, as a monument. Nothing has matched it. Everything in the “domestic thriller” section owes it a drink.
Reading notes
Run the bath hotter than you think. Put the towel within reach, not on the rail. Use the Kindle for anything you haven’t read before. And when the chapter ends on a hook, which it will, every two pages, remember: the water’s getting cold, and she’s still in the stairwell.