What better way to spend a snowy afternoon than with a really great page-turner. Here a few suggestions to help eat up those hours indoors:

The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins: TGOTT is being heavily marketed as the next Gone Girl – it’s even been  optioned for film by Dreamworks. This fast-paced thriller follows Rachel, a thirty something Brit whose life is descending into shambles, due to being jilted by her husband and a developing drinking problem. After a few devastating misjudgments, Rachel finds herself embroiled in a mysterious disappearance rife with timeline gaps and unexpected suspects. As with Gone Girl, the book relies on the accounts of different characters to tell the full story, those accounts are mostly unreliable, and the plot of the novel is full of twists that catch the reader off-guard.

Her by Harriet Lane: Set in London, and full of sharp social and psychological insight, the narrative unfolds from the alternating perspectives of Nina and Emma, two thirty-something women whose lives have led them down very different paths. On the surface, Nina is a trendy artist and Emma is a harried mother of two. Nina knows Emma somehow, but Emma shows no indication that she knows Nina when they meet. What is the connection between these women, and why does Nina suddenly take such an interest in Emma? Motivations are revealed and the result will not disappoint.

Another title to watch out for is called The Kind Worth Killing, by Chelmsford native, author Peter Swanson. His first book, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, is a gripping mystery that takes place in Boston and the North Shore, and was hailed as one of the best first novels of 2014 by the Washington Post. His latest, a re-imagining of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, begins on an overnight flight from Boston to London, where two strangers form a dark bond over a plot to commit murder. Nelson DeMille calls it “an extraordinarily well-written tale of deceit and revenge told by a very gifted writer…The twists are not just in the plot; they are also in the heads of the plotters.”