Rachel Hawkins

Retells Jane Eyre in a gated Alabama suburb, with a dog walker, a rich widower and a wife who is not in an attic but is very much not dead either.

The Wife Upstairs is funnier and nastier than the setup suggests, and Hawkins is precise about southern money and the women who marry into it. Reckless Girls stranded a group on a remote Pacific atoll.

She wrote young adult fiction for years first, including the Hex Hall books, and the switch to adult suspense was a deliberate change of register rather than a graduation.