Beneath the Twist: Lindsay Kent, author of My Twin the Murderer, on the challenges of writing a thriller with an emotional core . . .
To me, every great thriller shares one essential trait: beneath the twists, revelations, and pulse-quickening suspense, there is something deeply human at stake. The stories that linger aren’t memorable simply because of what happened, but because of why it mattered. Beneath the danger lies grief, love, betrayal, longing. They stay with us by reaching past the plot and into something emotionally true. I grew up devouring this kind of fiction, drawn to stories that didn’t just entertain, but unsettled me in a deeper way. Long before I had the language for it, this was always the standard I wanted to reach. So when the idea for my debut novel first arrived, I knew the suspense alone wouldn’t be enough—I would have to dig far deeper to create the kind of emotional stakes that truly endure.
A Foundation in Nonfiction
For the past twenty years, I’ve worked as a documentary filmmaker, telling stories rooted in real lives. Nonfiction sharpens a particular instinct: to listen closely, to notice what people won’t say outright, to trace the emotional logic behind their choices. You learn to ask not just what happened, but what it felt like—and what it cost. In that sense, the foundation of storytelling doesn’t change across mediums. Whether it’s a film or a novel, the work is the same at its core: uncover human motivation, shape an emotional arc, and create an experience that makes someone feel something true.
But over time, I began to feel the limits of nonfiction more acutely. Reality is vast, but the frame we put around it is not. There are ethical boundaries, narrative constraints, and the ever-present responsibility to represent real people with care. Sometimes those constraints sharpen a story. Other times, they keep you from going where the emotional truth actually leads.
Fiction, I realized, offers a different kind of freedom. It loosens the grip of literal truth so you can reach for something deeper. When we encounter a fictional character, we’re often more open—more willing to sit with discomfort, to question our assumptions, even to recognize parts of ourselves we might otherwise resist. There’s a kind of permission embedded in fiction. It invites curiosity rather than defensiveness. It allows us to engage with difficult ideas—not as abstractions or judgments, but as lived experiences.
That realization opened a door for me. And in a more literal sense, so did psychedelics.
Lessons From the Trip
My personal experiences with psychedelics fundamentally altered how I understand identity. For much of my life, I operated within a carefully constructed framework of who I believed myself to be: my values, my roles, my history. It felt stable, even necessary. But it was also limiting in ways I didn’t recognize.
My first experience with LSD disrupted that structure completely. The closest analogy I can offer is this: it was like waking up in a prison cell I hadn’t known I was in. The walls had always been there, shaping my sense of what was possible, but I had mistaken them for reality itself. In that moment, I saw not only the bars, but the open door. The realization wasn’t just that I could step outside—it was that I always could have. Beyond that threshold was something expansive, disorienting, and profoundly liberating: a sense that identity is not fixed, that the self is more fluid than we tend to believe.
That experience stayed with me. It informed the films I went on to make about psychedelics—Going Furthur, The Split, Plant Medicine. I met people from all walks of life who suffered from depression, PTSD and addiction, and witnessed their own internal evolution through psychedelic experiences. I have immense gratitude for all I documented and learned, but after years of working in that space, I felt there were aspects I hadn’t been able to fully articulate. Some ideas resist straightforward explanation. They’re experiential, emotional, even paradoxical.
That’s where fiction became not just appealing, but necessary.
Inspiration For My Debut Novel
My Twin the Murderer began as a concept that could stand on its own as a thriller: a story driven by suspense, layered with twists, built to keep a reader turning pages. But from the beginning, I knew the plot was only one layer. Underneath, there had to be something more intimate, something grounded in the complexities of human connection.
At its heart, the novel is about sisterhood: the ways we mirror each other, the ways we define ourselves in relation to those closest to us, and the fragile line between connection and separation. It’s about suppressed trauma and addiction, not as isolated experiences but as forces that ripple through relationships and across time. And it’s about consciousness itself: how our perception of reality can be influenced, manipulated, even weaponized.
The Thriller Framework
In many ways, the thriller framework allowed me to explore these themes more honestly than I could in nonfiction. The heightened stakes, the twists, the shifting perspectives—they mirror the instability of memory and identity. They create a space where the reader can feel disoriented, question what’s real, and, in doing so, engage more deeply with the emotional core of the story. No psychedelic trip necessary.
Because for all their potential, these experiences are not inherently safe or simple. They can illuminate, but they can also destabilize. That duality—healing and harm, insight and confusion—felt essential to capture. In the context of a thriller, it becomes not just a philosophical question, but a source of tension.
At its core, this book is built on one belief: the most powerful mysteries are never just about the secrets outside us, but the ones buried within. Because the greatest tension doesn’t come from what we have yet to discover about the world—it comes from what we fear discovering about ourselves when the illusion finally falls away.
(c) Lindsay Kent
About My Twin the Murderer:
Neuroscientist Evelyn Malcolm has built her life on reason. She believes in clean data, repeatable results, and the comforting illusion that the mind can be mapped, measured, and controlled. But when the man she has secretly loved is found dead, Evelyn’s carefully constructed world collapses.
Now a prime suspect in his murder, she’s forced back into the orbit of her estranged twin sister, Vivian—a volatile mystery writer and recovering addict whose life has been defined by impulse, instability, and excess. When the twin’s DNA is discovered at the crime scene, the case fractures into something far more disturbing. Two sisters. One victim. Matching genetic fingerprints. And no clear explanation for what really happened.
As the sisters are pushed beyond their limits, Evelyn is forced to confront everything she has spent her life denying: the unreliability of memory, the fragility of identity, and the terrifying possibility that the mind is not a neutral observer, but an active participant in its own deception. And clearing her name may require the one thing she has always avoided: trusting her sister.
Propulsive, hallucinatory, and darkly funny, My Twin the Murderer is a mind-bending psychological thriller about the hidden costs of believing we are fully in control.
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