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Originally Posted by gmw
I've had similar difficulties. One of the problems is that having an "unreliable narrator" theme is actually a spoiler for some stories - and with a mystery that can be disastrous for the first-time read. Your idea of concentrating on the other half of the theme is probably a good idea ... but I'm going to have to think about this a bit longer.
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Since suspense is my go-to genre, I've read many books where the twist is that the narrator you've been trusting all along is actually a diabolical liar, and of course revealing that is a spoiler. But often the unreliability is clear from the outset--the narrator has memory loss, for example, and is trying to piece together what happened.
Some examples in the memory-loss subgenre are
Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson,
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins,
Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin,
The Memory Game by Nicci French. (A classic of the genre is
The Black Curtain by Cornell Woolrich; the POV character has amnesia but the story is written in third person. Sadly, there's no e-book, or I might have tried to sneak it into the nominations anyway.)