I know some people think it's a waste to ask for something with a plot twist since if you go in expecting a plot twist it's "ruined" but I don't care, even if I know a plot twist I tend to end up loving looking for foreshadowing and clues.
I find I tend to love movies, TV shows, and games that involve wild plot twists and I'm not very well read and think books like these could help me get more into reading.
I have more specific criteria as well:
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I want the book to kind of challenge me and then shock me anyway. What I mean by this is I want the book to start either immediately or within the first few chapters giving me a mystery to solve, and then, even though I'm thinking the whole book what the solution to the mystery is, it still manages to surprise me. The most obvious example of this would be a murder mystery, but I want something where the question is a bit stranger and not as easy as me going through the cast of characters and thinking which one could be the murderer. The examples I'm thinking of usually involve some sort of amnesia and the main character wondering who they are, maybe they're trapped somewhere and they don't know why, or maybe there's some magic/sci fi concept.
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The twist is really well foreshadowed. I want to be able to reread the book and see dozens of tiny clues I missed that feel obvious in hindsight.
Ever since I was a kid I've been really into video games like Ace Attorney, Umineko, Ghost Trick, and Zero Escape which generally fit the above criteria, and a criticism of these games would always be "this just feels like reading a book. If I wanted to read a book I'd just read one instead of playing a game" and yet I've never been able to find books that tell stories in the way those games do, with an immediate obvious mystery that has a really satisfying answer that's well foreshadowed and surprising without feeling like it comes out of nowhere.
Another good example of what I'm looking for is something like The Good Place, Shutter Island, Mulholland Drive, or Arrival, although both of those don't really seem like mysteries initially. If you have good Murder mysteries or novels that don't start off with an obvious central mystery please feel free to recommend those too.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions and for reading such a long post!
by salutarykitten4
1 Comment
Beth O’Leary has some good plot twists. The No-Show is a story of how a man stands up 3 women for dates on Valentine’s Day and it shows how his relationship with each woman unfolds. There are actually a few plot twists there. Anyway, O’Leary’s plots almost always feature a plot twist. They’re ChickLit and Romance which isn’t everybody’s cuppa tea. (And all these recs will be those genres. I’ll try to look for non-romance later.)
The book I’m rereading right now is Underneath It All by Kate Canterbary. Which had a minor plot wrinkle but sets up a major plot twist in the second book, The Space Between. Oh and if you keep going through the series (it follows a group of 6 siblings as they find love), you slowly get books that happen simultaneously. There’s even times where characters have secrets for a whole book or multiple books before you figure out why they’ve been acting strange.
Anyway, I’m literally rereading the series after binging it last year to see if, knowing what I know now, anything pops out to me.
Fix-It Witches by Ann Aguire has a major plot twist and a smaller one. The second book also has a major plot twist and the books overlap somewhat so the plot twist from the first book makes an appearance again.