And Then There Were None

Island isolation strips away civilization and reveals moral nature — Golding's boys do to each other what Christie's judge does to adults, but without premeditation

Christie's own follow-up to the isolated-group formula — a snowbound inn replaces an island, and this time there is a detective, though the same paranoid dynamic operates

French's debut inherits Christie's unreliable-narrator and guilt-as-psychological-architecture; the detective destroys the case from inside, just as Christie's characters destroy themselves

The locked-room mystery scaled to an island estate — Larsson's Vanger family island is a direct descendant of Christie's Soldier Island, complete with isolation and long-buried guilt

The most extreme extension of Christie's formula — isolated group forced to kill each other until one survives, with the added dimension of state coercion replacing individual justice-obsession

Guilt as the organizing principle of a closed social circle — Tartt's students, like Christie's guests, are all implicated, and the question of who will be destroyed by knowledge of what they did drives the entire narrative