4 Epistolary Crime Thrillers That Use Letters to Build Suspense
In my new novel Dear Future Me a nostalgic school project turns into the catalyst for murder. On a seemingly ordinary morning in the seaside town of Saltburn every member of the class of 2003 receives the “Dear Future Me” letter they wrote to themselves twenty years earlier…part of a long-forgotten assignment buried beneath teenage hopes and exam stress. But within an hour of the letters arriving, one of the recipients is dead. As Audrey Hawken begins to piece together the events leading to her best friend’s death, she discovers that some letters contain more than memories….they contain confessions, threats, and secrets meant to stay buried. And someone is willing to kill to keep it that way…
It got me thinking about the powerful role that letters can play in crime fiction. The best thrillers thrive on discovery, on slow reveals and dangerous revelations and a letter, by its very nature, is a message from another time, a truth frozen in ink. It’s a confessional and a time capsule, a ticking bomb delivered by the postal service.
In Dear Future Me, the letters are both literal and symbolic; teenage time-travel missives laced with the unfiltered vulnerability of youth. But when a confession page winds up in the wrong envelope and lands in the wrong hands, it ignites a deadly chain of events. Because letters aren’t just storytelling tools, they’re weapons, too. And in crime fiction, that’s exactly what makes them so thrilling.
So here, in celebration of the power of the pen, are some of my favourite crime and thriller novels that use letters as a narrative device and do it brilliantly:
But not everybody is convinced of the experimental treatment’s efficacy–nor of the good intentions of those involved. As tension grows within the community, things come to a shocking head at the explosive dress rehearsal. The next day, a dead body is found, and soon, an arrest is made. In the run-up to the trial, two young lawyers sift through the material–emails, messages, letters–with a growing suspicion that the killer may be hiding in plain sight. The evidence is all there, between the lines, waiting to be uncovered.
Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
What all these novels share is the understanding that a letter is never just a letter. It’s a narrative device with built-in suspense: a sealed envelope, a hidden voice, a message with the power to change everything. In crime fiction, where the past is always clawing its way into the present, letters offer a direct line to buried secrets. They reveal what characters wanted, what they feared, what they tried to hide…and often, what they got wrong. A good letter in a thriller doesn’t just add tension. It adds humanity. It gives us access to the raw, unpolished thoughts of people who didn’t know they were being watched. And that’s what makes the device so irresistible to write. In Dear Future Me, the letters aren’t only time capsules, they’re landmines. And once they’ve been opened, there’s no going back.
Discover the Book
Deborah O’Connor is the bestselling author of My Husband’s Son, The Captive, and The Dangerous Kind. Her latest thriller, Dear Future Me, is out June 3rd.
Upon opening them, the students are shocked to find that their envelopes contain old secrets that threaten to expose the truth about the tragic death of one of their classmates. And when one letter makes the beautiful and successful Miranda jump off a cliff to her death, the small community is rocked to its core.
Stunned by what has happened and armed with a clue of her own, Miranda’s best-friend Audrey decides to track down her old classmates to get to the bottom of Miranda’s death. And in doing so, she sets off a chain of events that could expose the truth not just about one untimely death, but two. From bestselling author Deborah O’Connor comes a searing thriller that exposes the grief, guilt, and secrets that riddle a small town, uncovering the far-reaching consequences of a decades-old tragedy.
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