3 Psychological Thrillers That Will Creep You Out

The Hitchcock Hotel

By Stephanie Wrobel

There’s some heavy subtext in the air when five guests arrive for a weekend at THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL (Berkley, 340 pp., $29), a New England inn stuffed with movie artifacts and presided over by their former college classmate Alfred Smettle. The group has seen little of each other since graduation 16 years earlier, in part because of a terrible series of events surrounding the film studies class they took together.

Seething with years of built-up resentment, Alfred has orchestrated the weekend as if he’s producing a twisted movie. “Only the best for my former best friends,” he thinks ominously, as he sets up the scene. At the welcome dinner, he unsettles everyone with his disquieting demeanor. “If you had to commit the perfect murder, how would you do it?” he asks.

This is the third book by the talented Stephanie Wrobel, and here she skips back and forth in time and perspective. Fans of Hitchcock will appreciate the many allusions to his work: a creepy servant modeled on Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca”; a murder of crows straight out of “The Birds”; a “Psycho”-esque dead mother, mercifully offstage.

At first, the story seems to run along a familiar bullied-student-seeks-revenge-years-later track. But it takes some unexpectedly pleasing, if loopy, detours. It turns out that Alfred, for all his scheming, isn’t the only one with a hidden agenda.

The President’s Lawyer

By Lawrence Robbins

Rob Jacobson, a powerhouse Washington litigator, has been a close friend of Jack Cutler, until recently the president of the United States, since their school days in Brooklyn. As Lawrence Robbins’s courtroom drama begins, Jacobson takes on an explosive case: defending Cutler from charges of murdering a beautiful young lawyer who worked for him at the White House and with whom, you guessed it, he was having an affair.