8 of the Best Mysteries About Family Secrets

Lydia Lee is 16 and the middle child of her family, feeling pressure from her parents to succeed both educationally and socially. Then, one morning, she’s found dead. As the family spirals in the aftermath of her mysterious death, cracks in the family’s foundation appear. With storylines alternating between the Lee’s past in the 1950s and the present in the 1970s, family secrets play a key role in what happened to Lydia and why.

When Libby was a baby, she was adopted. Now, she’s turning 25 and a letter arrives with the names of her birth parents inside along with a revelation that she inherited a mansion. But the mansion turns out to be in rough shape and, with it, comes a history with its own fill of secrets Libby wasn’t expecting to find.

Fleeing an abusive husband in China, Jasmine Yang winds up in New York with no money and nowhere to turn. But, she has a goal: to find the daughter that was taken from her. Her journey intersects with Rebecca, a wealthy woman with a professor husband and an adopted daughter navigating a workplace scandal. How will their paths intersect? Pick this up to find out!

It’s Easter and the Merton family begrudgingly gets together to enjoy a meal together in their upstate New York home. But that night, Fred Merton and his wife Shelia are murdered. With a large inheritance on the line and family secrets lurking, the culprit could be anyone, including their own children.

Death doesn’t make Dahlia Lighthouse blink twice. She was raised in a true-crime-obsessed family, after all, and her childhood was full of murder documentaries and reenactments as part of her homeschool curriculum. At 16, her twin brother left their home with only a note in his place. Now, 10 years after leaving her morbid home, Dahlia must return for the burial of her father. But inside her father’s assigned grave is the body of her twin brother. What happened a decade ago and who put him there? Dahlia’s unique education might be exactly what she needed to find out.

Journalist Camille Preaker did everything she could to leave her hometown and her mother behind. But when two teenage girls are found dead with their teeth removed, she’s compelled to investigate. Now, she must face her cold mother and her 13-year-old half-sister while getting to the bottom of what was happening to young girls in the town she so desperately wanted to leave behind.

Marin Machado is living her dreams. She’s married to entrepreneur Derek, running her own hair salons, and raising their little boy, Sebastian. But when Sebastian is kidnapped from a shopping center, the close eyes of the police and a private investigator threaten to shatter Marin’s perfect life.

In the summer of 1975, Barbara Van Laar, daughter of the Van Laar family, goes missing from her family-owned summer camp. She’s not the first of the Van Laar family to disappear from that very land. Fourteen years ago, her brother, Bear, disappeared. As history repeats itself, the Van Laar family and those employed by them are thrust back into the spotlight, revealing social dynamics and family secrets alike.