Best books… Alex Michaelides

The screenwriter and author chooses his favourite thrillers. His debut novel, The Silent Patient (Orion £7.99), was a New York Times number one bestseller and is out now in paperback

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie, 1942 (HarperCollins £7.99). I think this is by far the best book Christie wrote – so simple, so sparse, a handful of characters. The denouement and the character dynamics are resolved in a stunning twist, and you realise you’ve been looking at the story the wrong way up from the start. Genius.

A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell, 1977 (Arrow £8.99). My favourite book by Ruth Rendell. The audacious opening line is possibly the best in all crime fiction: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” The rest of it explains that statement. The perfect why dunnit.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, 2012 (Weidenfeld & Nicholson £8.99). In my mind, this has always been the one to beat. It’s Agatha Christie on acid – one unreliable narrator (or possibly two) and a mid-point twist that makes your head explode. Few books have given me so much pleasure.

The Woman in White

by Wilkie Collins, 1859 (William Collins £2.50). I always come back to this novel – one of the very first psychological thrillers, and still one of the best – a swirling nightmare of secrets, murder and madness, with a truly evil villain in Count Fosco.

The Silence of the Lambs

by Thomas Harris, 1988 (Arrow £8.99). I think it’s hard to overestimate the continuing influence of this novel, for the character dynamics as much as for the plot. It created the genre within a genre of psychiatrist-led murder investigations and, without it, I never would have written

The Silent Patient.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, 1938 (Virago £8.99). I was obsessed with this book as a teenager – a Gothic classic about romantic obsession, jealousy and cruelty. I can still feel the shiver run down my spine as I read the twist and discovered the terrible truth about Rebecca.