Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1971 and worked as a journalist before her fiction took off. She joined Entertainment Weekly in 1998 as a feature writer, later became its television critic, and wrote her first novel, Sharp Objects (2006), while still on staff. That debut, about a reporter sent to cover a series of murders in her own hometown, won the Crime Writers' Association's New Blood Dagger and Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and was shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

Dark Places (2009) follows a woman who begins to doubt that her imprisoned brother really murdered their family during the Satanic panic of the 1980s, when she was a child. Gone Girl (2012) centers on Nick Dunne, a creative writing professor in small-town Missouri, and his wife Amy, who disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary; by 2016 it had sold more than 15 million copies. Flynn wrote the screenplay for David Fincher's 2014 film of Gone Girl, co-wrote HBO's 2018 Sharp Objects miniseries with Marti Noxon, and co-wrote the film Widows with Steve McQueen. She has not published a novel since Gone Girl; her short story The Grownup won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story.

If you have not seen the 2014 film, start with Gone Girl and read it before anything spoils it: much of its pull depends on what you don't yet know about Nick and Amy. If you have seen the film, start with Sharp Objects instead. It is her first novel, and its mystery will be new to you unless you watched the 2018 HBO series. Its setup, a reporter sent back to her hometown to cover a series of murders, gives you her style without the expectations Gone Girl now carries.

Dark Places works well as the third book. Its narrator re-examines the crime that destroyed her own family when she was a child, which gives it a more investigative shape than Gone Girl. For something short between novels, The Grownup (2014) is a single story and the quickest way to sample her voice.