Alison Gaylin’s Best Books, According to Goodreads

This psychological thriller won Gaylin an Edgar for Best Paperback Original! Told from the varied perspectives of a large cast of characters, this novel chronicles the fallout of an apparent carjacking gone horribly wrong. A woman's car is stolen by a young man who runs down a bystander who rushed to help her...or so they say. As police rush to get to the bottom of the crime, certain people are lauded as heroes, and others are demonized. But nothing is as it seems in this puzzling crime.

In Gaylin's debut novel, Samantha Leiffer is minding her own business when she notices two strangers dump a strangely-shaped package into the Hudson River. She tries to ignore it (and the unsettled feeling she has about the scene)--she has enough on her plate her dramatic mother and cheating ex--but when a stranger wearing curiously mirrored contact lenses begins following her, Sam begins investigating what she's certain now must be a murder. She seeks help from a sexy homicide detective, and what they uncover is shocking.

In this sequel to Hide Your Eyes, Sam is trying to put her brush with murder behind her and connect with her boyfriend, a hot but emotionally distant cop. When a stranger hands her a note, she thinks maybe he's hitting on her...until she reads it and discovers that it's actually a warning--she needs to watch her back. Sam tries to brush it off, but when people around her begin dying, she can't ignore the dire words. Someone has targeted her and is stalking her. Who, and most importantly, why?

When Kelly was just seventeen, she shot and killed famous Hollywood movie director James McFadden in his own home during a party. The media speculated wildly about her motives, but Kelly kept them to herself and served her sentence, never breaking her silence. Now thirty-five years later, she's a free woman when her father-in-law, a one-time friend of McFadden, is shot and killed as well. Accusations immediately call out Kelly, but this time she has more people on her side, bent on proving her innocence. Is she guilty of a second (or even the first) murder?

In 1976, two teens named April and Gabriel went on a murder spree in Southern California before perishing in a fire...or so everyone thinks. Forty years later, Quentin Garrison still blames his troubled childhood on the chaos of those murders. Now a podcast producer, he's shocked when he receives a tip that April is still alive. He follows this information to Robin, a columnist in New York City who is coping the best she can with a myriad of personal problems. The last thing she needs to hear is that her mother might be a mass murderer. But when she becomes the victim of a home invasion soon after, she's forced to face the possibility that she might not know her mother at all.

After an especially traumatic case, investigative reporter Zoe has turned to writing fluffy interviews for a soap opera digest publication. Her subjects are celebrities now, and when one celebrity in particular, the sexy Warren Clark, invites her to his home in San Esteban, Mexico, she eagerly agrees. Before she leaves, her friend warns her of a strange murder case that has recently plagued San Esteban--a teen was murdered, his heart cut out. Zoe ignores the warning, but when she arrives in Mexico and Warren acts strangely and weird occurrences make her suspicious, Zoe finds herself sliding back into her old ways, on the trail of a killer.

Working for a tabloid magazine in Hollywood isn't exactly the career that Simone pictured, but it pays the bills. She's gotten good at getting information no one is willing to share--working undercover, going through trash, eavesdropping. When a soap opera star dies by suicide, it seems like just another sad story until her personal assistant insists that she was murdered...and suddenly Simone's skills in investigating the underhanded way come in handy when it becomes apparent she's tracking a murderer.

This first novel in the Brenna Spector series focuses on the case of a missing girl, a missing woman, and their connections to Brenna's own past. Brenna has a rare neurological disorder that enables her to remember every detail of her days--an exceedingly useful skill when it comes to investigating cases. When a little girl goes missing from a family barbecue, the case goes cold until a missing woman a decade later reopens her case, and as Brenna investigates, signs point to her own sister's kidnapping years earlier.

Estella is famous as the older half-sister of the adorable septuplets who are the stars of the reality TV show Seven is Heaven. And no one knows just how good of an actress she is, keeping her real feelings about being a reality TV personality from her mom, stepdad, and the cameras. When she receives a Christmas present from her biological father--who died a decade earlier--she's sent to group therapy for troubled young stars as punishment for the apparent prank. But when a paparazzo begins stalking her and claiming that Estella's dad is still alive, she'll have to investigate to find the truth.