Coming Undone: Female Characters That Will Haunt You For Days

Verity by Colleen HooverThere’s nothing quite as captivating as a morally ambiguous female lead or, better yet, a female villain. In a world that often demands women behave a certain way, crime fiction novels have become a megaphone for dismantling these stereotypes through eccentric or plain evil heroines. As charming as they are haunting, the following female characters have stuck with us way past their endings—from the horrifying twists in Colleen Hoover’s Verity to the systematic mind games that weave the plot of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. No, they’re not always crazy. They may not even be villains. But they’ll sure as hell get under your skin.