Book Roundup: Art of the thrill to be found, predictably, in the twist

Donal O’Keeffe reads between the lines to gather a roundup of some of the best chillers and thrillers published this year

L-R: Andrea Mara, Douglas Kennedy, Olivia Kiernan

You'd wonder whether they all start at the end, writers of thrillers, coming up with the killer (pun intended) twist first, and then working backward from there, like in the twistiest Inspector Morse, where at the finish poor John Thaw literally needed a blackboard to explain how he’d solved the case.

Read enough thrillers and you will unavoidably see formulas, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; after all, in the right hands, the formula is only the delivery system to get you to the good stuff, and each of the five thrillers reviewed here is good, and some are very good.