If what grabbed you in The Postman Always Rings Twice was Frank and Cora’s lusty, amoral pact to get rid of Nick with a staged car “accident,” you’ll be right at home with Walter Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger plotting an insurance scam in Double Indemnity. The same sulphurous mix of desire, calculation, and double-cross drives this story—only here the actuarial tables are as lethal as any blackjack, and the final reckoning lands with that same Cain-brand inevitability.

You liked how Postman never flinched—from the brutal planning to the ugly aftermath of Frank and Cora’s crime. Thompson goes even darker. Deputy Lou Ford narrates The Killer Inside Me in a deceptively mild drawl while his "sickness" flowers into shocking violence. Like the courtroom reversals and grim fate that dog Frank, every turn here feels doomed—only this time you’re trapped inside the mind of the storm.

If the breathless speed of Frank and Cora’s plot—meet, scheme, strike, and scramble through consequences—hooked you, The Hunter delivers that same piston pace. Professional thief Parker is double-crossed and carves a straight-line path through New York to get his money back. Like Postman’s taut chapters around the hit-and-run setup and legal feints, this one is stripped to muscle and motion, every page a forward shove.

Frank and Cora think killing Nick will free their desire; instead, it curdles into suspicion and dread. Zola charted that anatomy of guilt first: Thérèse and her lover Laurent murder her husband during a river outing, only to find their nights haunted and their touch turned sour. If the way Postman’s romance rotted from the inside stuck with you, this earlier classic makes that decay the whole, devastating show.

Beyond the plotting in Postman, the psychic pressure—Frank’s hot-and-cold rationalizations, Cora’s fierce hunger to own the diner—gives it bite. Hughes offers a similarly tight psychological vise. Dix Steele, a charming veteran adrift in postwar L.A., insinuates himself into a murder investigation even as a wary woman sizes him up. Like the uneasy breakfasts after Nick’s “accident,” every conversation here is a probe into what someone might be capable of—and what they’ll tell themselves about it.