March 25, 2026
Why Domestic
What makes the home the most frightening setting in the genre — and why I won't write anywhere else.
People ask me, occasionally, why I write domestic thrillers and not other kinds.
The question is usually polite. Sometimes it carries an edge — isn’t that a smaller genre? Aren’t you limiting yourself? The implication is that the world is the larger stage, and the kitchen is the smaller one. International espionage, the question suggests, must be more interesting than a marriage of eight years.
I don’t think it is.
What the kitchen has that the war room doesn’t
The war room has stakes. The kitchen has consequence. The difference is the difference between a book that scares you for an evening and a book that re-rents space in your head for the rest of your life.
The reader of a Cold War thriller closes the book and goes to dinner. The reader of a marriage thriller closes the book and, very quietly, looks across the table.
That look is the whole genre.
The four things that make domestic work
In my experience, a domestic thriller works on four levers at once. Most thrillers pull one or two. The good ones pull all four.
1. Proximity. The danger is in the same house. The danger uses the same coffee mugs. The reader cannot, by going home, escape the setting. The book follows the reader home because home is the book.
2. Trust. The threatened relationship is one the protagonist chose. A spouse. A best friend. A sibling. The genre is built on the violation of trust freely given — which is a more devastating violation than any betrayal at gunpoint.
3. Plausibility. Every domestic thriller is, somewhere in the back of the reader’s mind, plausible. The reader knows people like this. The reader is married to one. The reader has eaten dinner at the house. That plausibility does the work that, in another genre, would have to be done by car chases and explosions.
4. Reread. The domestic thriller is, almost uniquely, the rereadable thriller. The protagonist’s blindness on the first read is the reader’s blindness too. Once the truth is known, the entire history of the relationship becomes a different artifact — and the reader, almost without exception, wants to go back and see it from the other angle.
A genre that does all four of those at once isn’t a smaller stage. It’s a louder stage. The volume is just in a different register.
Where I will and won’t go
I will write about a marriage. A neighbour. A family. A friend. A self. A workplace. I will write about the moments where the people you trust the most become the people you have to read twice.
I won’t write about international espionage. Other people do that well. I’m interested in the cup of tea on a Tuesday.
The cup of tea is, as it turns out, plenty.