As anyone who’s read one of my novels knows, I adore a Setting with a capital S: a tropical island, a super yacht in the North Sea, a glass cabin in the woods, a cell in a high-security women’s prison — the more remote the better. Because what could be more fun than confining your characters somewhere they cannot escape, and then slowly tormenting them as the plot unfolds?
I’m aware this may make me sound a little sadistic, but if so, I’m in good company. Here are some of my favorite thrillers with isolated settings — both classic and contemporary. These books may make you wary of flying, vacationing or generally venturing outside your home ever again. All the more excuse, then, to crack open a book and curl up by your own fireside with a sense of delicious relief.
Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None
By Agatha Christie
No list of thrillers set in remote locations would be complete without the grande dame of the locked-room mystery, Agatha Christie. “And Then There Were None” is often hailed as her masterpiece, for good reason: It’s an almost perfectly plotted locked-room conundrum set at a house party on an island cut off from the mainland by a terrible storm. But “Murder on the Orient Express,” which unfolds on a train stuck in a snow drift, is my favorite (in fact, Christie’s panicked travelers trapped in a luxurious temporary prison inspired me to write my own version in “The Woman in Cabin 10”).
The Guest List
By Lucy Foley
Many writers have riffed off the classic island setting of “And Then There Were None.” “The Guest List,” by Lucy Foley, is a particularly stylish reimagining, with a murder upending a high-class wedding off the coast of Ireland. The guests here harbor almost as many secrets as those in Christie’s original, and the isolated beauty of the location is a brilliant backdrop to the toxicity that unfolds.
Black Narcissus
By Rumer Godden
This entry stretches the traditional definition of a thriller — it is an uncompromisingly literary novel about religion, repression and the follies of imperialism — but it certainly fulfills the psychological part. You may be familiar with the 1947 film (or the 2020 mini series) about a group of nuns trying to establish a teaching outpost in a remote corner of the Himalayas, but it’s worth seeking out the original novel, by one of my favorite writers. Rumer Godden grew up in India and “Black Narcissus,” like much of her writing, grapples with the arrogance and hubris of the colonial Raj.
Hostage
By Clare Mackintosh
It doesn’t get much more isolated than an airplane in flight. In her excellent 2021 thriller, Clare Mackintosh sets the action on a 20-hour nonstop flight from London to Sydney. When a group of hijackers attempts to take over the plane, one flight attendant must face an agonizing life-or-death choice — 30,000 feet in the air. A truly nail-biting novel, though probably not the best vacation reading for those afraid of flying.
Project Hail Mary
By Andy Weir
This thriller is also set aboard an aircraft — one even more terrifyingly isolated than Mackintosh’s Boeing 777 (and more remote even than Andy Weir’s debut novel, “The Martian,” which largely takes place on the surface of Mars). Weir’s narrator wakes up on board a spacecraft barreling away from Earth at great speed. His only companions are two corpses — his former crewmates — and his memories. As the narrative unfolds, we learn exactly how he came to be in this position — and why the Earth he left behind may be in even greater peril than he is.
Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six
By Lisa Unger
A remote cabin in the Georgia woods is such classic slasher-movie territory that the reader may begin this novel expecting a knock at the door from a sinister unwanted guest. But the three vacationing couples in Lisa Unger’s twisty thriller have brought along more than enough problems to power the plot on their own. Add in an overly attentive host and a haunting history to the property, and this dream cabin quickly becomes every vacationer’s Airbnb nightmare.
All the Sinners Bleed
By S.A. Cosby
The isolation of Charon County, the setting for S.A. Cosby’s excellent crime thriller, is as much societal as physical. Occupying a remote, teardrop-shaped peninsula at the edge of Virginia, Charon is a cloistered community, founded in bloodshed, where some of the most prominent citizens have no regard for outside laws. This tale of Titus Crown, the county’s first Black sheriff, and his quest to uncover the identity of a serial killer who has been ravaging the area for decades is Southern Gothic to its very core.
Jamaica Inn
By Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier is best known for her Cornish masterpieces “Rebecca” and “My Cousin Rachel.” The lesser known “Jamaica Inn” is equally Gothic but set in a very different kind of Cornwall — not among the aristocratic great houses and estates of those novels, but at the remote and run-down Jamaica Inn. A real place that served as an outpost for the smuggling trade in the 1800s, the inn still stands at a windswept crossroads on Bodmin Moor. And although Mary Yellan is an excellent main character, with none of the passivity of some of du Maurier’s other narrators, it’s the author’s stunning evocation of her beloved Cornwall that is the real star of this book.
The Shining
By Stephen King
This is a different kind of thriller: part horror, part psychological unraveling, part ghost story, with a terrifying specter at its core — the glowering, isolated Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains, where Jack Torrance has taken on a job as a winter caretaker. What begins as a marvelous playground for Jack’s young son, Danny, quickly becomes a prison for the family as the winter snows set in. While the malignancy of the settings in some of the other novels on this list is atmospheric or implied, here subtext is made text and the Overlook becomes the antagonist Danny and his friend Dick Hallorann must fight against, and to which Jack eventually succumbs.
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