8 Thrillers About Dysfunctional Mother-Daughter Relationships

What happens when the most intimate relationship in nature—mother and child—is perverted and twisted beyond recognition? Nobody has more power to harm than the one entrusted to nurture and protect. So observes Dr. Lily Patel, the strange psychiatrist in You Know What You Did: 

“The mother-daughter bond is one of the strongest in nature. When you’re young, it keeps you tethered, protected. Later the same ties can hold you back, strangle you.” 

This aptly describes the conflicted relationship between the novel’s main character Annie Shaw, who is an artist, wife, and mother, and her own mom Mẹ, a troubled Vietnam War refugee. After Mẹ, dies, Annie’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she thought she’d vanquished years ago, comes roaring back—but this time, the disturbing thoughts swirling around in Annie’s brain might be coming true. 

The eight thrillers I’ve gathered below explore the darker side of mother daughter relationships. Though they vary in degrees of dysfunction from “Maybe we’ll skip Thanksgiving” to “Hide the knives,” each book is guaranteed to deliver raw emotion, tension, and complexity.

Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen

When does the maternal instinct to protect verge into toxic control? With her signature intricate plotting and whiplash-inducing twists, Sarah Pekkanen explores the question of mother daughter boundaries in Gone Tonight. Twenty-four-year-old Catherine Sterling has never spent more than a few nights away from her mother Ruth. When Catherine finally decides to spread her wings by accepting a job offer in another city, Ruth embarks on a desperate mission to stop her daughter from leaving. Triggered by her mother’s increasingly strange behavior, Catherine begins to ask questions. Why did Ruth insist that the two of them relocate every few years, and why was she always prepared to move at a moment’s notice—even in the middle of the night? As Catherine secretly investigates Ruth’s past, Ruth intensifies her campaign of manipulation and subterfuge. Pekkanen masterfully ratchets up the tension with perspective alternating between Ruth’s old journal entries and Catherine in the present day.  

All Her Little Secrets by Wanda M. Morris

“With Martha, I could never be sure whether her touch would hurt or heal, whether her words would cut or console.” Ellice Littlejohn refers to her abusive, alcoholic mother as “Martha” or “Ma’am” never using any specific maternal reference. Indeed, during Martha’s frequent drunken stupors, it is Ellie, herself, who must keep house and serve as a stand-in mother to her own little brother. With the help of a neighbor, and against Martha’s wishes, teenage Ellie escapes small-town poverty to attend a private boarding school, eventually earning an Ivy League law degree and landing a plum in-house corporate lawyer job. On its surface All Her Little Secrets is a conspiracy thriller with a white-collar backdrop. But what makes the novel truly pulse-pounding is the very real dimension of racism and Ellie’s situation of being the only black woman in a c-suite of white men. With interludes to Ellie’s childhood in Chillicothe, Georgia, Morris examines whether or not we can truly suppress the past and to what extent can we reinvent ourselves.

The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok

The Leftover Woman is a poignant family drama with the page-turning engine of a thriller. Jasmine Yang flees her rural village in China and travels to New York City in search of her daughter, given up at birth for adoption by her abusive husband. In debt to the snakeheads who smuggled her into the United States, Jasmine is forced to work as a waitress in a seedy strip club. Just a few miles away—but it might as well be another country—privileged publishing executive Rebecca Whitney struggles to balance a high-powered career, marriage, and caring for her adopted Chinese daughter Fifi, who Rebecca begins to worry has bonded a little too much with the new Chinese-speaking nanny. The dual storylines collide in an emotionally satisfying conclusion to Kwok’s suspenseful study of motherhood, identity, and class.

Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel

Loosely inspired by the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case, Darling Rose Gold quickly departs from its real-life source material to create an even more twisted mother-daughter relationship, predicated on coercive control, simmering rage, and the blinding need for validation. The novel opens as Patty Watts is released from prison after serving five years for poisoning and abusing her daughter Rose Gold in a case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome. Patty makes the chilling declaration, “My daughter didn’t have to testify against me. She chose to.” So why is Rose Gold now welcoming her mother back into her life? Wrobel expertly wields dual timelines and head-to-head POVs to craft a taut cat-and-mouse story, only the roles of predator and prey shift constantly between mother and daughter in a delightfully destabilizing turn.

Jackal by Erin E. Adams

Jackal, a novel that is in varying proportions thriller, horror, small-town suspense, and contemporary fiction, cannot be forced into any one literary genre. This is apt as its main character Liz Rocher has long felt out of place both in the predominantly white rust belt town where she was raised by her single Haitian immigrant mother and in the neighboring African American community. After spending fourteen years away in New York City, Liz reluctantly returns home to attend her best friend’s wedding. Even as an adult, the single and childless millennial struggles to conform to the expectations of her mother, an accomplished physician and perfectionist, who immediately blames Liz’s recent breakup on weight gain. Literally and figuratively, Liz has spent her entire life trying to make herself smaller to fit in. “I cut away parts of myself. I made space for someone—something else…I turned myself into the perfect vessel for a monster.” Enter the titular Jackal. During the wedding reception, the bride’s daughter wanders into the woods and disappears. As Liz investigates, she uncovers a decades-long pattern of missing Black girls overlooked by an apathetic police force and largely unremembered by the local townspeople—except by their mothers and sisters.

The Push by Ashley Audrain

Simultaneously bleak and compulsively readable, Ashley Audrain’s horror-tinged psychological thriller lays bare the dark side of motherhood. The first-person narration of Blythe Connor draws us into a nightmare in which every single maternal insecurity, every single fear is realized. It’s like a literary version of those Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks (Motherhood Edition). Interspersed throughout Blythe’s account are the stories of her mother Cecilia and her grandmother Etta. Blythe comes from a long line of distant, disturbed mamas. After giving birth to her own daughter Violet, Blythe has trouble bonding with the baby. As Violet grows older, Blythe observes her daughter’s lack of empathy and worries the child might even be capable of violence. Fox, Blythe’s husband, blames her for being a bad mom. Is it a question of nature versus nurture? “The Bad Seed” or an unreliable narrator? Much like motherhood, the answers are not so simple, and Audrain keeps us guessing until the final, gut-wrenching paragraph.

Things We Do in the Dark by Jennifer Hillier

This dual-timeline thriller toggles back and forth from a present-day Hollywood homicide investigation involving an aging comedian and his sugar baby wife to a twenty-five-year-old Canadian murder trial pitting daughter against mother. Three generations of Reyes family women—Ruby Reyes dubbed “The Ice Queen” after she is convicted of killing her married lover; Ruby’s daughter Joey an exotic dancer who dies in a tragic fire; and Lola Celia, Ruby’s immigrant mother who at one point takes in Joey—illustrate the grim cycling of sexual violence through generations of passivity. The novel’s abusive maternal relationships are unabashedly dark. However, Hillier’s characteristically tight pacing and rapidly shifting settings, from seedy Toronto strip club to tony Beverly Hills mansion, keep your eyes glued to the page.

Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

Nina Simon’s captivating debut is a sanguine exploration of mother daughter dysfunction. After a cancer diagnosis upends L.A. real estate mogul Lana Rubicon’s life, she finds herself convalescing 300 miles north of the city in her semi-estranged daughter Beth’s remote coastal cottage. Just as the sexy fifty-seven-year-old begins to ponder whether boredom or cancer will kill her first, Beth’s teenage daughter Jack discovers a murdered man floating in the Elkhorn Slough nature preserve and becomes the prime suspect. Lana, eager to exercise her vitality after months of grueling chemo, leaps to her granddaughter’s defense. But she can’t clear Jack’s name on her own, and the three generations of fiercely independent Rubicon women must work together to solve the case. In the process, they unearth a mare’s nest of lies, betrayal, and unresolved family issues—their own as well as those of the colorful locals. Simon succeeds in crafting both a smart contemporary mystery and an exquisite ecological love letter to Monterey Bay.