Wren Ashby

There’s nothing more entertaining than fictional people making terrible decisions.

Give me a picture perfect marriage, a suspicious text message, a husband who suddenly starts “working late,” and a wife who knows more than she’s admitting, and I’m canceling my plans.

In real life? Absolutely not. If a friend texts me “can you talk?” with no context, my blood pressure goes through the roof. I like my coffee hot, my group chats boring, and my neighbors exactly as nice as they seem.

But in a book? Pour me another glass of wine. I’ll be on the couch at 1 a.m. telling myself “one more chapter.”

And judging by the thriller section in every airport bookstore, I’m not the only one.

Almost every story I can’t put down has somebody hiding something. An affair. A second phone. A first wife nobody mentions. A brother who “moved to Arizona” in 1998 and hasn’t called since. You know, normal family stuff.

Give me a nice family in a nice house on a nice street, and by chapter three I’ve decided someone is buried under the hydrangeas. I can’t help it. Pretty landscaping makes me suspicious now, and I blame the genre for that.

I think part of it is that everyone has a public version of themselves. The Christmas card version. And we’ve all driven past the house with the perfectly edged lawn and wondered what’s really going on behind those curtains. Fiction lets us find out.

We also all believe we’d see it coming if it were us. I seriously doubt it. I read these books constantly and I still get blindsided.

Which is probably why I have zero interest in writing about perfect people. Perfect people talk about their feelings in calm, healthy ways. They make responsible choices. They have never once rescheduled a dentist appointment three times. Good for them, truly. I just don’t want to read about them.

Give me the woman scrolling through her husband’s Venmo at midnight trying to figure out who “J” is. Give me the man who changes the subject every time someone asks where he grew up. Give me the best friend who always seems to know everybody’s business a little before everybody else does.

Those people I get. Not the crimes (I hope). But the jealousy, the insecurity, the pride, the way you can talk yourself into a bad decision because it feels like the only option you’ve got? That’s just being a person. My characters just take it a lot further than most of us would.

And honestly, the most interesting character usually isn’t the one with the secret. It’s the one who knows the secret and decides to keep their mouth shut. What’s that costing them? Who are they protecting? Give me that character, and I’ll find a hundred ways to complicate their life.

That’s also where my favorite moment in a psychological thriller comes from: the moment I realize I’ve been rooting for the wrong person this whole time.

You’ve been there. You’ve spent two hundred pages defending somebody. You’ve explained away every red flag. You’ve basically been working as their unpaid defense attorney. Then you hit chapter thirty-two and suddenly you’re side eyeing everyone. The husband. The neighbor. The sweet older lady down the street who keeps dropping off banana bread. Especially her. Nobody bakes that much without a reason.

I love that feeling as a reader, and I’ll admit I love doing it to readers even more. The trick is giving you just enough to make up your mind, then pulling the rug out. I’d like to tell you I don’t enjoy that part, but this is a post about secrets, so I’ll come clean. I enjoy it a lot.

Then you add romance, and it all gets worse.

Falling for someone is hard enough without wondering whether they’re using a fake name, hiding an ex, or tangled up in a crime. That’s a lot of baggage to bring to a second date.

But that’s exactly why I keep putting romance in my suspense. When two characters have real chemistry and neither one is being totally honest, the tension is unbearable in the best way. You want them to end up together. You also want one of them to run a background check first.

Love raises the stakes. Getting lied to by a stranger is one thing. Finding out the man sleeping next to you has an entire other life is something else. Sleep tight.

In the end, I think it comes down to plain old curiosity. We want to know what people aren’t telling us. We want to know if the charming guy at the dinner party is actually that charming, or if he’s charming the way people in true crime documentaries are charming.

Fiction lets us snoop without getting caught. We can dig through bad marriages, fake friendships, and whole families built on lies, and the worst thing that happens to us is we stay up too late. All the drama, none of the subpoenas. That’s a pretty great deal.

As a writer, that’s what I keep coming back to: regular people in way over their heads. How far would you go to keep something buried? What would you give up? And what happens when it all starts coming apart, which it always does, because somebody always knows something, somebody always talks, and somebody always thinks they got away with it.

That last person is my favorite. That’s usually where the fun starts.

So tell me: when you read a thriller, are you the one who calls the twist halfway through, or are you suspicious of literally everyone until the last page?

Me? I don’t trust anybody.

Especially the husband.

— Wren Ashby