For Fans of Sandra Brown

French Silk is often overshadowed by Brown's later, slicker thrillers, but it earns its New Orleans setting in a way those books rarely do. A lingerie catalog mogul becomes the prime suspect in a televangelist's murder, and the prosecutor assigned to the case has every reason not to believe her. The courtroom plot is more rigorous than most of her contemporaries managed, and the moral argument at the center, about desire, performance, and guilt, is actually interesting. It got a TV movie adaptation in 1994; skip it and read the novel.

Gillian Flynn's HBO adaptation of Sharp Objects scratches the same itch as Brown at her most gothic: a woman returning to a suffocating Southern small town, family secrets that have calcified into violence, and the suspicion that the most dangerous person in the story might be the one narrating it. Amy Adams holds the whole thing together the way a Brown heroine always does, by being smart enough to see the trap and walking into it anyway.

Nobody would call True Detective Season One a romance, but it has the same fundamental architecture as a Sandra Brown novel: Louisiana heat, secrets layered over secrets, two people who should not trust each other becoming entangled anyway. The procedural surface sits over something much stranger and more personal. Brown readers who think they only like romance will find themselves fully absorbed.