The most effective psychological thrillers don't rely on external violence or sudden revelations. They build tension through restraint: the conversation that doesn't happen, the question that goes unasked, the moment of recognition that arrives too late.
In my work, I'm interested in how ordinary lives become containers for psychological pressure. A marriage that functions on the surface but carries quiet resentments. A relationship that appears settled but contains fundamental misalignments. A character who appears to have made peace with their choices, but who carries the weight of paths not taken.
The thriller element comes not from external threat, but from internal recognition. The moment when a character understands something they've been avoiding, when they see clearly what they've refused to see. This recognition is often devastating precisely because it arrives through quiet accumulation rather than dramatic revelation.
I write about people who have made reasonable choices, built functional lives, and who then find themselves caught in patterns they recognize but cannot easily escape. The tension comes from the gap between what they know and what they can acknowledge, between what they feel and what they can express.
Psychological thrillers succeed when they make the interior visible. Not through exposition or explanation, but through behavior, through the spaces between words, through the small moments that reveal larger truths.
In The Smile of the Bougainvillea, Dev moves through relationships and geographies, accumulating experiences and losses. The thriller element isn't external danger, but the psychological cost of deferral: what happens when emotional truth is repeatedly postponed, when difficult conversations are avoided, when recognition comes only after choices have been made and consequences have taken hold.
The bougainvillea blooms in inhospitable conditions, persistent and resilient. But persistence can also become constraint. The same quality that enables survival can prevent growth. This tension—between endurance and entrapment, between accommodation and authenticity—drives the psychological engine of the novel.
I'm drawn to stories where the real danger is not external, but internal: the slow erosion of self, the quiet compromises that accumulate, the recognition that comes too late to change anything but one's understanding of what has already happened.