What's fascinating about 2019 is how many of these books use structure to highlight unreliability. 'The Golden Hour' by Beatriz Williams isn't a pure thriller, but it has suspenseful historical threads. The dual timelines feature women whose narratives are constrained by their eras—one is a silenced wife in a bad marriage, the other is a journalist piecing together a story from biased sources.
Their unreliability comes from what they're forced to leave out, what they can't say aloud, and the personas they must adopt to survive. You have to read between the lines of their official stories to find the truth.
Don't sleep on 'The Whisper Man' by Alex North. While the main thriller plot involves a serial killer, a huge part of the tension comes from the perspective of the young boy, Jake. His perception of reality is filtered through trauma and an active imagination, hearing whispers and seeing things that may or may not be there.
You're constantly trying to decipher what's a supernatural element, what's a psychological symptom, and what's a genuine clue. The father's perspective isn't entirely reliable either, as his own grief and fear color his interpretation of events. It's less about a narrator consciously lying and more about the fragility of human perception under extreme stress, which is a fascinating take on the concept.
Honestly, I spent half of 'The Banker's Wife' by Cristina Alger unsure whose side anyone was on, including the grieving widow protagonist. She's digging into her husband's death in the world of offshore finance, and every revelation could be a planted clue or a red herring.
Her reliability is compromised by her emotional state and her incomplete understanding of her husband's secret life. Even the journalists in the story are working with sources who are lying to them. It paints a picture of a world where truth is a commodity that's actively hidden, manipulated, and sold, making any single narrator's perspective inherently partial and suspect.
2026-07-24 19:57:50
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A GAME OF LIES
Geneva .A. Zwicker
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It started with one scandalous kiss caught on camera.
She expected damage control not to be declared the girlfriend of the billionaire who ruined her life.
He’s cold, calculating, and her ex’s powerful cousin.
They agree to fake it for four months for money, for revenge, for survival.
She became the fake girlfriend of the billionaire who ruined her life
He’s ruthless. She’s vengeful. Four months. One deal. No feelings.
But soon, the lies cut deep… and neither of them can tell if the obsession is still pretend.
Amira Santis, a sharp-tongued investigative journalist, ruins billionaire Montez De Vitalio’s company with one exposé. In return, he blacklists her. Her career is over. But after an odd encounter when photos of Montez sharing a kiss with her in a hotel gets out, he has no option but to announce her as his lover to the public.
Now with them both in a compromising situation, Amira takes his offer to pretend to be his girlfriend in the eyes of the public for a period of four months in exchange that he pays her and gets back at her cheating ex, who also happened to be his cousin but Amira is not the same girl he once destroyed. She has secrets of her own. And Montez? He didn’t plan on falling for the one woman who swore to ruin him.
Their lies ignite an obsession neither can control, and soon, love and war become indistinguishable.
Lena Mercer makes a living off saving and believes that love can be saved no matter what. However, when a frightened woman named Claire Reynolds appears at her office door insisting she is being purposely murdered by her husband, Lena is hesitant to trust her.
Days go by, and Claire vanishes into thin air. Worrying but brushing it off as coincidence, Lena attempts to pick up where they left off—until she uncovers unsettling information connecting Claire's life to her own. The same scent. The same coffee order. Even bruises in identical locations.
And then Lena begins receiving ominous messages: "You know the truth. Don't look for me."
Even as her husband pushes for a divorce, Addalyn is determined to save her failing marriage. Desperate to keep her marriage, she gets into a car accident and pretends to have amnesia. But, by chance, she discovers a hidden world of danger and intrigue.
As she navigates this dark new reality, a mysterious man with mesmerizing green eyes who promises to reveal the truth about her past draws her in.
However, as she struggles to separate the truth from the lies, she realizes that everything she thought she knew could all be lies. With her world unraveling around her, Addalyn must face the reality of her situation and make decisions that will change her life forever.
Lying and holding secrets comes to us naturally, as natural as breathing and looking on either side of the road before crossing. We all do it to protect ourselves because sometimes the truth can hurt us.Some are harmless little white lies, but some secrets hide horrible things. Those lies will always come haunting those who seek to keep their lips sealed. Follow Caroline, Charlotte, Chloe, and Caleb's journey, as their life is turned upside down as they fight to keep their lips sealed about the murder they accidentally committed.Everyone keeps secrets. Everyone lies. You better make sure no one saw what you've done before making up your lies because all it takes is one person with the truth on their lips for your life to be destroyed.
Years after Iris betrayed her husband, Triston, the couple remains together only to maintain the appearance of a marriage that has long since crumbled. Living under the same roof as strangers, they navigate a hollow partnership built on old wounds, lost love, and the quiet ache of what once was.
Two years after her sister vanished without a trace, Sera Duvall is barely surviving emotionally and financially. But when a chance encounter leads her into the arms of Lucien Calder, the tech billionaire who was the last known person to see her sister, she makes a dangerous choice: infiltrate his world and expose the truth from within.
Lucien is controlled, powerful, and hiding something behind every careful word. He offers her a deal: stay with him for one week, and he’ll give her what she wants. But the closer Sera gets to uncovering what happened, the more tangled she becomes in a web of secrets, emotional manipulation, and a slow-burning desire she didn’t see coming. And in a world where love is leverage and lies are currency, the truth may destroy them both.
‘The Chalk Man’ by C.J. Tudor uses dual timelines to explore unreliability. Adult Eddie is trying to solve a childhood mystery, but his memories of that summer are colored by nostalgia, trauma, and the imperfect perspective of a twelve-year-old. The child Eddie’s chapters aren’t lies, but they are naïve and missing critical adult context. The adult Eddie’s narration is haunted and possibly misleading as he tries to protect himself from the full truth. The past is not a foreign country; it’s a story we tell ourselves, and Eddie is an unreliable editor of his own history.
The foreign film scene had a banger in 2020 with 'The Whistlers' (Romanian: 'La Gomera'). It's not a straightforward thriller, more a neo-noir crime film, but the entire plot revolves around deception, double-crosses, and a policeman who is absolutely not telling the audience the whole truth. The narrative structure is deliberately convoluted, making you question the order of events and the protagonist's loyalties at every turn. It's a stylish, puzzle-box movie that uses unreliable narration to keep you as disoriented as the main character.
I'd throw 'A Flicker in the Dark' by Stacy Willingham into the mix. The narrator is a psychologist whose father was convicted of murdering several girls when she was a child. When new girls start disappearing in her town, she's thrust back into the trauma. Her reliability is compromised by childhood memories, possible inherited tendencies, and the immense pressure she's under. The Louisiana setting adds a thick, humid layer of unease.
For a claustrophobic, single-setting thriller, 'The Woman in Cabin 10' by Ruth Ware. The narrator is a travel journalist on a luxury boutique cruise. After a night of heavy drinking, she believes she witnesses a woman being thrown overboard, but all passengers are accounted for.
Her credibility is instantly shot—she was drunk, on medication, and under stress. The entire investigation (and the reader's belief) hinges on whether this anxious, messy woman is a reliable witness. The setting makes escape impossible, trapping you with her growing panic.
Let's talk about 'The Last Party' by Clare Mackintosh. The primary narrator is a detective with a personal connection to the case, which immediately clouds her judgment. Her professional observations are constantly at war with her private memories and grief. The unreliability here is nuanced; she's a trained observer trying to be objective, but the reader can see the cracks where her personal bias seeps in. It adds a fantastic layer of tension to the police procedural format. You're solving the mystery alongside her, but you also have to solve her, figuring out when to trust her instincts and when to doubt them.