If you like the sort of high-concept thrillers that grab you by the throat in the first paragraph and don’t let you drop until the last word, then add the novels of London-based author John Marrs to your reading list.
Born in Northamptonshire in the English Midlands, award-winning writer John Marrs began his working life as a journalist specializing in celebrity interviews.
His first novel, The Wronged Sons (reissued as When You Disappeared), was published in 2014. Inspired by a true-life newspaper story, this tense psychological thriller gained Marrs an immediate cult following.
Marrs’s next book, The Vacation (retitled in later editions Welcome to Wherever You Are), a taut-as-a-tightrope tale based a little on the writer’s back-packing student days, took him to the top of the bestseller charts.
He’s been there ever since, gaining a vast and loyal global audience that loves his inventive, immersive, and unsettling worlds.
Here are seven thrilling John Marrs books you won't be able to put down.
The Good Samaritan
End of the Line is the number you ring when you feel like you have nothing left to live for. The volunteers who man the phones give the callers hope and a reason to carry on.
All, that is, except one.
Laura doesn’t want to restore confidence or revive spirits, she wants to destroy them. Instead of giving the desperate a reason to live, she likes to give them something entirely different—a reason to die.
Enter Ryan, a grieving man whose young, pregnant wife recently jumped to her death.
What follows is a nerve-shredding cat-and-mouse game that will leave you as breathless as running up six flights of stairs.
The One (Dark Future Book 1)
Marrs’ third novel, published in 2016, has a touch of Michael Crichton-style scientific ‘What If?' about it.
In the near future scientists discover that everybody shares a single gene with one other person on the planet—their actual soulmate.
A simple DNA test can put an end to all those unsuccessful dates and unhappy marriages. Or can it?
Following the quest of five people searching for true love, but stumbling into something far darker and less expected, The One became a smash hit Netflix series starring Hannah Ware and is the first in his Dark Future series of standalone novels.
The Marriage Act (Dark Future Book 2)
The second in the Dark Future series is a fine example of Marrs’ matchless ability to combine domestic suspense with a disturbing vision of the future.
In a desperate bid to preserve the nuclear family, the British Government makes marriage compulsory and installs monitoring devices in every family home to keep watch on couples.
Can the relationships of eight young people survive the prying scrutiny of the authorities, or will they implode under the pressure?
The Marriage Act is twisted, page-turning mix of Love Island and 1984.
The Family Experiment (Dark Future Book 3)
In the third Dark Future novel, Marrs introduces us to a future world in which bringing up children has become so prohibitively expensive only the elites can afford to have them.
Enter tech company Virtual Children. For a monthly fee, they’ll let childless couples bring up an AI-generated infant.
To launch the product they create a reality TV show in which 15 lucky couples get to compete to see who does the best parenting job.
The result is a chilling thriller set in a wild yet weirdly plausible dystopia—The Truman Show re-written by Aldous Huxley.
What Lies Between Us
A mysterious woman chained up in the attic is a literary trope that goes back to Jane Eyre.
Marrs breathes fresh, suspenseful life into the concept with this creepy tale of two female housemates who share a dark past and even darker secrets.
An unsettling fusion of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Room, What Lies Between Us has sold over one million copies and was the deserved winner of The International Thriller Writers Award.
The Passengers
The image of self-driving cars sold to us by Silicon Valley is one of utopian safety.
Naturally, Marrs takes an altogether different view in this futuristic thriller in which a hacked computer sees eight auto-piloted cars heading toward each other at high speed.
Why have the eight passengers been chosen by their tormentor? And will any of them survive?
The Passengers is a brilliant mix of 70s disaster movie and modern nightmare with a touch of Agatha Christie stirred in.
The Minders
Another thunderbolt of a near future thriller set in the same universe as The Passengers and The One (it’s best if you read those first before tackling this one).
The Minders are the UK government’s attempts to solve the issue of computer hacking.
Instead of storing all their secrets on a giant mainframe, they’ll embed all their data into the brains of five individuals who have the rare neurological condition of Synthesia.
It’s a fine idea except that all those secrets are very, very valuable and there are plenty of people out there who are prepared to do anything it takes to get them.
