There is a particular kind of reader who finishes A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and sits quietly for a moment, just staring at the wall. Not from disappointment. From the specific, slightly unhinged satisfaction of having been completely and comprehensively outsmarted by a debut novelist who published her first book at twenty-six. Holly Jackson’s 2019 novel, which spent years percolating in the wider cultural conversation before its Netflix adaptation with Emma Myers arrived in August 2024 and catapulted it to a new stratosphere of readership, is a structural marvel dressed in the clothes of a YA thriller. It wears that label honestly, but it punches well above it.
I’ve read more mystery novels than most people have hot meals. I’ve reviewed them, argued about them at conferences, assigned them to book clubs, and occasionally thrown one across the room in frustration. What Jackson accomplished with AGGGTM is rarer than her modesty in interviews suggests: she constructed a procedural mystery with the emotional intelligence of literary fiction, anchored by a protagonist, Pip Fitz-Amobi, whose obsessive intelligence feels genuine rather than convenient. The novel’s format, incorporating case notes, interview transcripts, and Pip’s personal log, mimics the architecture of true crime podcasts in a way that doesn’t feel gimmicky but absolutely essential to the story’s texture.
The book sold millions of copies worldwide and became a New York Times bestseller before it ever saw a television screen. That matters, because it reminds us that the audience for sharp, structurally inventive YA mystery existed long before Netflix certified it. And now that the adaptation has been renewed for a second season, the pipeline of readers looking for something to fill that particular hole is only growing.
This list is for those readers. Not for people who want a vague approximation of the experience, but for people who want the specific combination of elements that made AGGGTM addictive: an intelligent female protagonist driven by something close to obsession, a community that holds dark secrets in plain sight, a plot that genuinely earns its twists, and prose that moves. I’ve organized my selections not alphabetically or by publication date, but by what kind of AGGGTM reader you are. Because not everyone responded to it in the same way, and the best reading recommendations honor that nuance.
For Readers Who Crave Small-Town Secrecy and the Mythology of a Good Lie
There is something distinctly unsettling about the village or suburb in which everyone already knows everything and yet manages to know nothing at all. Jackson understood this paradox deeply, and Little Kilton functions as a character unto itself. The books in this section share that architecture.
One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus
If there is a single book that has been pressed into the hands of AGGGTM fans more than any other, this is it, and the comparison is entirely deserved. McManus opens with a premise that feels almost aggressively engineered for maximum narrative pressure: five students enter detention, and only four walk out alive. The one who dies, Simon Kelleher, ran the school’s most feared gossip app and had damaging information primed for release about each of his four surviving classmates.
What McManus does particularly well, and what connects her work to Jackson’s, is the construction of social architecture. Bayview High is a system with its own internal logic, its own power structures, and its own capacity for institutional cruelty. The four protagonists, despite their apparent archetypes, develop real interior lives as the pressure mounts. The rotating point of view narration, like Jackson’s multi-source format, prevents any single perspective from becoming too comfortable. I have a deep suspicion that readers who loved the procedural unspooling of AGGGTM will lose sleep over this one in exactly the same way.
What separates McManus from lesser imitators in the YA mystery space is her refusal to let guilt and innocence operate as binary states. Moral ambiguity is not a twist here; it’s woven into the fabric of every relationship.
Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen M. McManus
McManus’s second standalone deserves its own mention rather than being bundled with its predecessor, because it accomplishes something slightly different and arguably more atmospheric. Twin siblings Ellery and Ezra arrive in their mother’s hometown of Echo Ridge, a small Vermont town with a history of murdered homecoming queens that the community has collectively decided to normalize. The town’s cheerful surface over a foundation of repressed violence is handled with a precision that reminded me more than once of Jackson’s Little Kilton.
What distinguishes Two Can Keep a Secret is its treatment of inherited trauma. Ellery’s obsession with true crime is not pure intellectual curiosity, as Pip’s largely is. It is personal, tangled with family history, and slightly self-destructive. This is a shade darker in its psychology than McManus’s debut, and readers who found the later sections of AGGGTM’s trilogy most compelling, where Pip’s investigation starts to cost her, will find a kindred spirit here.
The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson
It would be almost negligent not to include Jackson’s own 2024 standalone, which demonstrates that she has not merely refined her formula but genuinely evolved as a craftsperson. Belle Price has spent her entire life as the surviving daughter of a woman who disappeared when Belle was two years old. When a documentary crew arrives to reinvestigate the case, Belle is dragged back into a grief and identity crisis she has carefully managed. Then a woman appears, claiming to be Rachel Price.
This is, in certain structural respects, a more sophisticated novel than AGGGTM. The unreliable narrator device is deployed with exceptional control, and Jackson’s understanding of how trauma and identity interact has deepened considerably. It lacks some of the procedural warmth that made Pip’s case notes so compulsively readable, but it compensates with a psychological density that lingers.
For Readers Driven by the True Crime Obsession Inside the Fiction
AGGGTM is, at its core, a novel about a girl who is obsessed with true crime before she accidentally becomes the protagonist of her own. Jackson was candid in interviews about drawing on podcasts and documentaries as inspiration. The books here share that particular cultural preoccupation.
Sadie by Courtney Summers
This is, without qualification, one of the most important YA novels published in the last decade, and it is almost entirely unlike AGGGTM in tone while being deeply similar in structure and ambition. Sadie is told in two alternating formats: the first-person present-tense narration of a nineteen-year-old girl hunting for her younger sister’s killer, and the transcript of a true crime podcast investigating her own subsequent disappearance.
The podcast format is where Sadie earns its place on this list. Summers understood something that Jackson also understood: the podcast as a narrative device is not just a stylistic flourish. It is a commentary on how we consume female suffering, how we render it palatable, how we turn grief into entertainment. Where Jackson uses the format to create procedural momentum, Summers uses it to interrogate the form itself. The result is a novel that made me set it down several times not from disinterest but from the effort of processing what I had just read. That is high praise from someone who has been doing this for a long time.
Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
Maureen Johnson’s trilogy, which begins with this 2018 novel, takes the true crime obsession and relocates it to a genuinely eccentric setting: Ellingham Academy in Vermont, a private school founded on the philosophy that learning should resemble a game. In the 1930s, the school’s founder lost his wife and daughter to a kidnapper who signed communications “Truly Devious.” The case was never solved. Stevie Bell, a teenager with an encyclopedic knowledge of famous crimes and a driving desire to solve the Ellingham cold case, arrives as a student.
What Johnson achieves here is a kind of cozy-dark balance that is genuinely difficult to execute. Ellingham Academy is eccentric and delightful and sinister in equal measure, and Stevie is the kind of protagonist whose interior voice is so specific and entertaining that spending time with her feels like a genuine relationship. The mystery plotting across the trilogy is intricate without becoming laborious. Readers who appreciated Pip’s methodical evidence-gathering will recognize a kindred investigative spirit in Stevie, though Stevie is considerably more prone to anxiety and self-doubt, which adds its own texture.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
I include Flynn’s debut here not because it is YA (it emphatically is not) but because it shares with AGGGTM a particular obsession: what does a small town do with its worst impulses? Camille Preaker, a journalist, returns to Wind Gap, Missouri to cover the murders of two young girls, and what she finds is a community that has metabolized violence into its social fabric so thoroughly that the dysfunction reads as normalcy. Flynn’s prose is deliberate and unsettling in a way Jackson’s never attempts to be; this is not a thriller that moves quickly. But for readers ready to graduate from AGGGTM’s procedural comfort into something with more psychological weight and genuine darkness, Sharp Objects is the logical next step.
The novel also shares AGGGTM’s deep interest in the performance of femininity and the particular ways women are expected to manage their own suffering. Both books ask, in their different registers, what it costs a girl to insist that something is wrong.
For Readers Who Want a Methodical Sleuth With a First-Rate Mind
Pip’s appeal is not just her determination. It is her method. She is not a character who stumbles into solutions; she builds them, systematically and sometimes against her own emotional interest. These books share that intellectual rigor.
The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Barnes was producing distinctive YA mystery fiction years before The Inheritance Games made her a household name in the genre, and The Naturals demonstrates the particular strength of her plotting instincts. Seventeen-year-old Cassie is recruited by the FBI into a classified program that trains exceptional teenagers to close cold cases by leveraging unusual perceptual gifts. Cassie’s gift is reading people, understanding their emotional history from behavioral cues. The program itself, the interpersonal dynamics among the Naturals, and the escalating case structure all contribute to a reading experience that is propulsive in exactly the way AGGGTM is propulsive.
What Barnes does here, and what connects her deeply to Jackson’s vision, is her insistence that intelligence should be dramatized rather than merely asserted. Cassie’s deductions are shown in process, not announced as conclusions. That methodological transparency is what separates genuinely satisfying mystery fiction from the kind that cheats.
The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Barnes’s later, more commercially successful novel is a different beast: wealthier, more architecturally elaborate, and built around a puzzle rather than a crime investigation in the traditional sense. Avery Grambs, a teenager with no connection to billionaire Tobias Hawthorne, inherits his entire estate upon his death, on the single condition that she live in Hawthorne House for one year. The Hawthorne grandsons, who were all raised to believe one of them would inherit, are none too pleased.
The novel operates less as a mystery and more as a very sophisticated puzzle box, with each chapter designed to reveal a new layer of a game whose rules are not fully disclosed until the end. Barnes’s understanding of how to structure revelation is exceptional, and readers who loved the moment-by-moment uncovering of evidence in AGGGTM will find that same pleasure operating here, though the emotional register is considerably more romantic. This is, let me be clear, not a complaint.
Here Lies Daniel Tate by Cristin Terrill
This 2017 novel is considerably less discussed than it deserves to be, and I find myself returning to it regularly when recommending books to AGGGTM readers who want something with a more morally compromised protagonist. Daniel Tate is a con artist. When a wealthy family, missing their son, mistakes him for their lost child, Daniel does not correct them. What follows is a deeply unsettling psychological thriller about identity, family mythology, and the particular horror of discovering that the family you’ve infiltrated may not be innocent either.
The unreliable narrator device here is executed with exceptional control. Terrill never allows the reader a comfortable interpretive position. What connects the novel to AGGGTM is its interest in what it means to be the person who sees through a community’s collective performance of normalcy. Pip’s investigation is driven by the conviction that the official story is wrong; Daniel’s survival depends on understanding how official stories are constructed and maintained.
For Readers Lured by Dark Academia and Institutional Menace
Jackson’s novel is set in a comprehensive school rather than an elite institution, but it participates in the same cultural fascination with how educational spaces become containers for cruelty. The books below take that architecture further.
The Ivies by Alexa Donne
Donne’s 2021 novel is sharper-elbowed and more explicitly satirical than most YA mysteries, and it earns every bit of that edge. Set at a fictional elite boarding school where the unofficial ruling clique is called the Ivies, the novel follows Olivia, a scholarship student whose proximity to power is purely strategic, as the social ecosystem she has carefully navigated is disrupted by a murder. The institutional critique here is not subtle; Donne is genuinely interested in examining how wealth and social capital operate within educational spaces to protect the guilty and burden the innocent.
What distinguishes The Ivies from lesser dark academia entries is its refusal to romanticize the setting. The school is not atmospheric and beautiful in a way that excuses its cruelty. It is atmospheric and beautiful and cruel in a way that illuminates how those qualities coexist so frequently in real institutions.
The Broken Girls by Simone St. James
St. James’s 2018 novel is the most atmospheric book on this list and the most overtly gothic. In 1950, Idlewild Hall was a school in Vermont designed to house the girls no one else wanted. In the present, journalist Fiona Sheridan begins investigating its history after her sister’s body was found on the grounds twenty years prior, and plans to restore the building force the case back into public attention.
The dual timeline structure, the genuine ghost story running parallel to the investigative procedural, and the novel’s deep interest in what institutions do to powerless young women all make it a natural companion to AGGGTM for readers with a higher tolerance for shadow. It is not a YA novel, but it shares Jackson’s conviction that the official verdict is almost never the whole truth, and that the pursuit of the real story is worth considerable personal cost.
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
Published in 2017 and enjoying something of a renaissance in reader attention as dark academia has become a defined genre category, Rio’s novel operates in a register quite different from Jackson’s. Oliver Marks has spent ten years in prison for a murder that occurred during his final year at an elite conservatory for classical theater students. Now released, he is finally ready to tell the detective who put him there exactly what happened.
The prose here is the finest of any novel on this list, and I mean that with full critical weight. Rio writes with the precision of someone who has thought deeply about how language constructs reality, which is appropriate for a novel about actors who have spent years inhabiting roles until the boundaries between self and performance blur dangerously. For AGGGTM readers who want their next mystery to also be a genuine literary experience, this is the one.
For Readers Who Prefer Adult Psychological Complexity Over Teen Procedural
Not everyone who loved AGGGTM loved it specifically because of Pip’s age. Some readers responded to the psychological architecture, the layered deception, the investigation of how communities process collective guilt. These novels share those concerns in adult registers.
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
Moriarty’s 2014 novel shares with AGGGTM a structural intelligence that is easy to underestimate because the surface is so compulsively readable. The framing device, community members being interviewed about a death at a school fundraiser, creates the same layered revelation structure as Jackson’s case notes and transcripts. The actual crime, and the social fabric that produced it, is assembled from pieces across the entire novel.
What I appreciate most about Moriarty, and what makes Big Little Lies a genuine companion to AGGGTM rather than simply a genre-adjacent experience, is her understanding of how domestic settings become containers for extraordinary violence. The schoolyard politics of Pirriwee Public are not merely a backdrop; they are the ecosystem in which tragedy becomes inevitable. Both novels are, at their heart, about what communities decide not to see.
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
This 2019 debut is, structurally speaking, the most perfectly engineered thriller on this list. Alicia Berenson, a celebrated painter, shoots her husband five times and then refuses to speak another word. Criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber is obsessed with understanding why, and his obsession drives the entire novel. The twist, which I will not describe in any detail, is the kind that retroactively transforms everything you have read and demands an immediate second reading.
Readers who loved AGGGTM for its carefully laid evidential trail and its final-act detonation of assumptions will find The Silent Patient a deeply satisfying experience. Both novels understand that the most important information is the information withheld, and that a reader’s confidence in their own interpretation is the most useful instrument the author has to work with.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Lockhart’s 2014 novel is told in an unusually spare, almost incantatory prose style that feels nothing like Jackson’s voice and yet achieves something similar: the controlled, deliberate withholding of information that the narrator herself only partially possesses. Cadence Sinclair Eastman returns to her family’s private island after a two-year absence she cannot fully remember, and the fragments of what happened to her that summer gradually reassemble.
The novel is, on one level, a mystery. It is also a meditation on privilege, family mythology, and the stories wealthy families tell themselves to avoid examining what they actually are. For AGGGTM readers who found the social critique embedded in Jackson’s novel as interesting as the plot mechanics, Lockhart’s more literary approach will feel like a natural conversation partner.
The Girls I’ve Been by Tess Sharpe
Published in 2021, this novel follows Nora O’Malley, a teenager who grew up as the daughter of a con artist and learned from childhood how to perform different identities, into a bank robbery. Nora and her ex-boyfriend and her current girlfriend are all taken hostage, and Nora’s survival depends on skills she has spent years trying to leave behind.
What connects this to AGGGTM is not the hostage premise but the deeper question the novel is asking: what does it cost a girl to be competent in a world designed to exploit her? Pip’s investigation is driven partly by moral conviction and partly by a refusal to be managed or dismissed. Nora’s survival is driven by the same force. Both protagonists are, at bottom, studies in a particular kind of female intelligence that functions best under pressure, and that neither novel allows the narrative to celebrate without also examining what it has cost.
The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
Jewell’s 2019 thriller takes its time revealing exactly what kind of novel it is, which is itself a deliberate structural choice that rewards patience. A twenty-five-year-old mystery around a house where three adults were found dead and a baby left alone is told from multiple perspectives including the now-adult child. The domestic gothic here is more European in flavor than most American thrillers, and readers who responded to AGGGTM’s specifically British atmosphere (retained even in the American market edition, which relocated the setting to Connecticut) may find Jewell’s sensibility a comfortable fit.
The novel’s interest in how charismatic adults manipulate young people, and how those who escaped such manipulation carry it forward in ways they may not recognize, is handled with considerable sophistication. It is not a puzzle box mystery in Jackson’s mode; it is a slow excavation, which is a different kind of pleasure and one that rewards a different kind of reading attention.
A Final Word on What This Genre Is Actually Doing
I want to resist the critical reflex of treating AGGGTM and its genre companions as merely entertainment, because I think that misses something important. The appetite for fiction in which a girl decides the official story is wrong and then systematically proves it is not incidental. It reflects something real about how investigative power is distributed in the world, about who gets to ask questions and whose questions get taken seriously.
Pip Fitz-Amobi is not remarkable because she is precocious. She is remarkable because she refuses, again and again, to accept that adults with institutional authority are better equipped than she is to determine the truth. That refusal, that deep epistemic confidence in the face of systemic dismissal, is what makes her genuinely electrifying as a protagonist. And it is what the best books on this list share with her, regardless of whether their protagonists are seventeen or forty-five.
The novels above are not all equally accomplished, and I have not pretended otherwise. Some are leaner pleasures; some are denser experiences. But all of them take seriously the proposition that the investigation of hidden truth is worthwhile, that the people doing the investigating matter, and that the story officially recorded is almost never the whole story. For readers who believe those things, and who AGGGTM reminded of how much they believe them, the reading list above should keep the lights on for a good long while.