8 books like The Inheritance Games, from A Good Girl's Guide to Murder to Truly Devious and We Were Liars: YA puzzles, rich families, and twisty mysteries.
Updated June 10, 2026
The Inheritance Games runs on a premise Jennifer Lynn Barnes openly built like a game: billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves virtually everything to Avery Grambs, a teenager he never met, on the condition that she move into Hawthorne House, a mansion riddled with secret passages, alongside the four grandsons he just disinherited. The book is really three pleasures braided together: a puzzle trail of riddles and hidden compartments, a wealthy family with knives behind every smile, and two Hawthorne brothers orbiting Avery. Barnes, who writes fast and plots faster, keeps all three moving at once.
The books below are sorted by which of those pleasures you want more of. For the puzzle-and-investigation thread, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and Truly Devious are the standouts, both built around a girl methodically working a case. For rich families hiding rot, We Were Liars and One of Us Is Lying deliver the secrets and the twists. And for the darker, stranger edges of YA mystery, Sadie and The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer push into true-crime grief and psychological uncertainty. Two outliers, The Elite and The Proposal, are here for readers who realize the competition and the romance were what they actually enjoyed.
A practical note: most of these are series openers (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, Truly Devious, Mara Dyer, The Elite), while We Were Liars, Sadie, and The Proposal are one-and-done. The entries below flag which is which, and how dark each one runs, since this list spans from rom-com to genuinely grim.
Read this for the locked-room setup and a cast where everyone is hiding something.
Karen M. McManus and Jennifer Lynn Barnes are the twin engines of modern YA mystery, and this is the book that kicked off the boom. Five students walk into detention, the creator of the school's gossip app dies in the room, and the four survivors all had reasons to want him gone. Like The Inheritance Games, it runs on rotating suspicion inside a closed circle, secrets that come out in carefully timed reveals, and characters who are more than the archetypes they first appear to be.
The difference is setting and stakes: this is a suburban high school murder case, not a billionaire's puzzle trail, so you get police interviews and media frenzy instead of riddles and secret passages. There is no Hawthorne House and no game to win, just a whodunit. It is arguably the more conventional mystery and the easier entry point for readers new to the genre, with sequels and a TV adaptation if it lands.
Read this if you want the mystery tilted toward the psychological and the strange.
Michelle Hodkin's trilogy opener shares The Inheritance Games' propulsive, what-is-going-on momentum: Mara wakes from a coma as the only survivor of a building collapse that killed her friends, remembers nothing, and then starts seeing things that should not be possible. Like Avery, she is a girl dropped into circumstances she cannot explain, working out the rules while everyone around her seems to know more than they say. The magnetic, secret-keeping love interest, Noah Shaw, fills the same slot the Hawthorne brothers do.
Be clear about what changes: this is a darker, older-feeling book that slides from mystery into paranormal thriller, and the reliability of Mara's own mind is the central question. There are no puzzles to solve alongside the heroine, and the answers arrive across a trilogy rather than a single volume. Pick it when you want atmosphere and unease rather than riddles, and skip it if you need your mysteries strictly grounded.
Read this first; it is the best pure mystery on the list.
Holly Jackson's debut is the most common answer to what to read after The Inheritance Games, and it earns that. Pip Fitz-Amobi reopens a closed local murder case as her senior capstone project, and the book lets you investigate with her: interview transcripts, suspect lists, and case notes are printed on the page, giving the same participatory, solve-it-yourself feeling as Tobias Hawthorne's riddles. Pip is an Avery-grade heroine, smart, stubborn, and underestimated, and the plotting is genuinely airtight.
What you trade away is the glitter. There is no fortune, no mansion, and almost no romance-forward subplot; this is a true-crime-flavored procedural set in an ordinary town, and the trilogy gets progressively darker, with a third book that divides readers on how far it goes. If The Inheritance Games hooked you with the puzzle trail rather than the billionaire fantasy, this is the upgrade, and the strongest single recommendation here.
Read this only if the competition and the romance were the draw, and start with The Selection.
The connection here is structural: like Avery, America Singer is an ordinary girl yanked into a palace of wealth and scrutiny, competing in a high-stakes game (in her case, for Prince Maxon's hand) while the media watches and rivals scheme. The love triangle tension, a heroine torn between two appealing options while navigating an institution stacked against her, will feel familiar to anyone invested in Avery's situation between Jameson and Grayson.
Two honest caveats. First, this is book two of Kiera Cass's Selection series, so begin with The Selection or the palace politics will not land. Second, there is no mystery at all: no puzzles, no inheritance, no dead patriarch, just dystopian-lite romance with gowns and rebel attacks at the edges. It belongs on this list strictly for readers who finished The Inheritance Games and realized the competition-and-courtship thread was the part they loved.
Read this if what you actually wanted was the romance, written for adults.
Jasmine Guillory's novel opens with a public spectacle, a botched jumbotron proposal at Dodger Stadium, and follows Nik, the woman who said no, into an unexpected relationship with the stranger who helps her escape the cameras. What it shares with The Inheritance Games is the pleasure of a sharp heroine suddenly thrust into public attention, and the warm, banter-driven relationship building that made the Hawthorne brothers chapters fly by.
Everything else is different, and you should know that going in. This is an adult contemporary romance with no mystery, no puzzles, and no teenage cast; it is the clear outlier on this list. Recommend it to yourself only if you finished Barnes wanting the relationship arc without the riddles, or as a palate cleanser between the darker mysteries here. As romance, it is breezy and confident; as a follow-up mystery, it is not one.
Read this if you can handle the darkest book on this list.
Courtney Summers's novel shares one big formal idea with The Inheritance Games: storytelling as a game with the reader. Half the book is Sadie's first-person hunt for the man she believes killed her little sister; the other half is the transcript of a serial-style podcast retracing her steps months later, and the gap between the two timelines is where the dread lives. Like Barnes, Summers makes you assemble the truth from pieces, and the audiobook, produced as a full-cast podcast, is one of YA's best.
But this is not an entertainment-first mystery. Sadie is a book about poverty, abuse, and a girl the world failed, and it withholds the tidy resolution Barnes always delivers. There is no romance, no banter, no mansion. Pick it when you want the puzzle structure put in service of something that hurts, and give yourself some recovery time after. It is the most acclaimed book on this list for a reason.
Read this for the closest thing to Hawthorne House: a riddle-built school with a cold case inside.
Maureen Johnson's Ellingham Academy is the nearest cousin to Hawthorne House in all of YA: a mountaintop school founded by an eccentric tycoon who loved riddles and hidden tunnels, where his wife and daughter were kidnapped in 1936 by someone signing letters as Truly, Devious. Stevie Bell, a true-crime-obsessed student, arrives determined to crack the case, and Johnson interleaves the historical kidnapping with present-day events exactly the way Barnes layers Tobias Hawthorne's games. Rich-eccentric puzzles, secret passages, a sharp underestimated heroine: every ingredient matches.
The pacing is the trade-off. Johnson is more patient than Barnes, spending real time on boarding-school texture and character before the dominoes fall, and the central mystery deliberately spans three books, so the first ends with more questions than answers. Readers who wanted Barnes's chapter-ending jolts every five pages sometimes find it slow. Readers who wanted a smarter, deeper puzzle usually find it better.
Read this for the rich-family secrets and a twist people still argue about.
E. Lockhart's novel is the concentrated essence of the Inheritance Games' other half: an old-money family, the Sinclairs, performing perfection on a private island while inheritance disputes and favoritism rot them from inside. Cadence, the eldest grandchild, is piecing together what happened during a summer she cannot remember, and the book builds to one of the most famous twists in YA. The dynamics of grandparent money warping every relationship will feel very familiar after Hawthorne House.
Formally it is a different experience: short, fragmented, almost prose-poetry in places, narrated by an unreliable girl in real pain, with no puzzle trail and no game to win. The mood is elegiac where Barnes is propulsive. It is also a true standalone you can finish in an evening (a prequel, Family of Liars, exists but is optional). Go in unspoiled; the less you know, the harder it lands.
What should I read after The Inheritance Games series?
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson is the most common and best next step, a tightly plotted mystery with an Avery-style heroine working a case piece by piece. If it was the riddles and the eccentric-rich-founder setting you loved, Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson is the closest structural match. Also note Barnes continues the Hawthorne world itself in The Brothers Hawthorne, The Grandest Game, and Games Untold.
How many Inheritance Games books are there?
The core trilogy is The Inheritance Games (2020), The Hawthorne Legacy (2021), and The Final Gambit (2022). Jennifer Lynn Barnes has since extended the world with The Brothers Hawthorne, a spinoff focused on Grayson and Jameson, The Grandest Game, which launches a new competition series, and the story collection Games Untold. Read the original trilogy in order first.
Is The Inheritance Games like Knives Out?
They share the skeleton: a wealthy patriarch dies, leaves his fortune to an outsider, and the resentful family circles. The Inheritance Games is the YA version, with puzzles, secret passages, and a romance thread instead of a detective. If that premise is what drew you, We Were Liars gives you the toxic rich family, and Truly Devious gives you the eccentric millionaire's riddles with a murder mystery attached.
Which book on this list is the most similar overall?
Truly Devious, because it matches the most elements at once: a riddle-loving tycoon, a building full of hidden passages, layered past and present mysteries, and a clever heroine. A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is the better pure mystery but lacks the wealth-and-puzzles setting. We Were Liars matches the rich-family side but not the game structure.
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