If you are looking for books like The Inheritance Games, the best options are We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson, One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus, and Caraval by Stephanie Garber. Each of these captures the puzzle-driven suspense, wealthy family intrigue, and sharp-witted female protagonist that define Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s series.
Why The Inheritance Games Became Impossible to Put Down
I still remember the afternoon I cracked open The Inheritance Games with the measured skepticism I bring to every YA thriller that arrives on my desk wearing a “Knives Out for teenagers” label. I was prepared to be mildly entertained. What I was not prepared for was losing three hours to a novel that kept reshuffling its own logic, hiding clues in plain sight, and deploying the kind of pacing that made chapter breaks feel like small acts of cruelty.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale and teaches creative writing and psychology at the University of Oklahoma, built The Inheritance Games from a deeply personal image: her father’s real-life dream home, complete with a secret passage he designed himself. That biographical detail matters more than it might first appear. The Hawthorne mansion is not merely a setting; it functions as a cognitive architecture, a space that mirrors the way obsession and grief can embed themselves into physical structures. Barnes understood that the house needed to feel alive, sentient almost, as if Tobias Hawthorne’s personality had seeped into every hidden corridor. She pulled it off.
The novel’s premise is deceptively simple. Avery Grambs, a scholarship-hunting teenager with no safety net, inherits the bulk of a billionaire’s fortune from a man she has never met. To claim it, she must live in Hawthorne House for a year alongside four grandsons who have every reason to despise her. From that single premise, Barnes constructs a machine of interlocking riddles, romantic tension, and revelation that kept the series climbing the New York Times bestseller list and ultimately selling well over six million copies worldwide. Lionsgate, partnered with Temple Hill Entertainment (the company behind The Twilight Saga and The Maze Runner), is currently developing a scripted television series, with Barnes herself attached as a producer. That is not a coincidence; it is a testament to how completely cinematic her plotting instincts are.
What makes finding a worthy successor difficult is that The Inheritance Games operates on multiple frequencies simultaneously. It is a puzzle mystery, a gothic mansion novel, a slow-burn romance, a study in class anxiety, and a meditation on how the super-wealthy use love as leverage. A book that scratches only one of those itches will leave readers feeling like they ordered a full meal and received an appetizer.
I have spent considerable time thinking about how to organize the books I am about to recommend, and I have landed on something other than a ranked list. What follows is a reader-oriented map: seventeen books grouped by the specific emotional or intellectual appetite that The Inheritance Games awakened. My hope is that wherever you locate yourself on that map, you will find exactly the book you need next.
Readers Haunted by the Seductive Rot of Old Money
There is a particular pleasure in watching a dynasty unravel from the inside, especially when the architecture of that dynasty has been constructed from inherited lies. The Inheritance Games understands this pleasure intimately; the Hawthorne fortune is inseparable from the Hawthorne pathologies. The books in this section share that understanding.
We Were Liars
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart is the most formally ambitious book on this entire list, and if you have been avoiding it because someone told you it was “a beach read with a twist,” I would gently encourage you to reconsider. Lockhart, whose Ph.D. from Columbia is in English literature, wrote this novel with full knowledge of its ending before she drafted the first sentence. That structural confidence is evident on every page. The prose alternates between crystalline realism and fractured fairytale, a technique that functions not as stylistic ornamentation but as a direct expression of how Cadence Sinclair processes trauma through narration.
The Sinclair family, who summer on their private island near Martha’s Vineyard, are the American dream rendered as a psychological horror show. Harris Sinclair wields his will and his wealth like a cudgel, pitting his daughters against each other in a generational competition whose rules only he understands. The parallels to Tobias Hawthorne’s posthumous game are striking enough that E. Lockhart herself blurbed The Inheritance Games, calling it “the most fun I’ve had all year.”
What distinguishes We Were Liars from most YA fiction is the moral weight it assigns to wealth itself. The island, the trust funds, the beautifully renovated houses: all of it is contaminated by the human cost of its accumulation. Lockhart does not let her characters off the hook for loving a world built on exploitation, even when those characters are teenagers who did not build it. Kirkus Reviews awarded it a starred review, describing it as “riveting, brutal and beautifully told,” and R.L. Stine called its twist “the most heartbreaking” he had ever encountered. I am inclined to agree, though I will say no more about it here.
The Cousins
Karen M. McManus has a gift for taking the mechanics of a classic mystery setup and loading it with contemporary anxieties about family loyalty, class, and reputation. The Cousins sends three estranged siblings to their grandmother’s private island estate after a lifetime of silence, and then proceeds to dismantle every assumption they carry through the gate.
What I find most effective about this novel is McManus’s treatment of inheritance not as a financial instrument but as an identity crisis. The grandmother’s letter, which opens the book, functions almost as an inverted will: rather than distributing wealth, it withholds explanation. The cousins must excavate the truth from the island’s history the way archaeologists excavate ruins, carefully, skeptically, aware that every artifact they find might be planted. The Cousins is not as stylistically adventurous as We Were Liars, but it is tightly plotted and emotionally honest about the way family mythologies distort individual identity over generations.
American Royals
Katharine McGee’s American Royals imagines an alternate United States in which George Washington accepted a crown, and the Washington family has governed as royalty ever since. The premise sounds whimsical; the execution is sharper than it first appears.
McGee, who blurbed The Inheritance Games, understands something that Barnes also grasps intuitively: romantic tension is most electrically charged when it is entangled with questions of power and legitimacy. The Washington heirs move through a court environment in which everyone is performing a role assigned by birth, and the performance is both exhausting and seductive. If what you loved about The Inheritance Games was the sense of being an outsider pressed against the glass of impossible wealth and wondering whether stepping through it would cost you yourself, American Royals will satisfy that hunger in a more explicitly political register.
Readers Who Relish a Puzzle Engineered to Outwit Them
Not everyone who loves The Inheritance Games is primarily in it for the romance or the family drama. Some of us are there for the riddles. Tobias Hawthorne left behind a house that thinks, and the pleasure of watching Avery decode it is intellectual as much as emotional. The books below offer that same cognitive reward, in different registers.
The Westing Game
Ellen Raskin’s Newbery Medal-winning novel from 1978 is, in the most literal sense, the ancestor of The Inheritance Games. Sixteen heirs assemble to hear the will of the eccentric millionaire Samuel W. Westing, only to discover that the will is itself a game: a puzzle that must be solved, with the fortune as the prize. Raskin distributes clues across the novel with the precision of a watchmaker, and the satisfaction of watching those clues click into alignment is as pure as any mystery I have encountered in the genre.
“Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows.” That line, quoted from Raskin’s novel, is the kind of aphorism that sounds simple and then keeps echoing.
The Westing Game is technically a middle-grade novel, but I would argue that designation undersells it considerably. The puzzle is genuinely difficult enough to stump most adults, and the social satire running beneath the mystery is sophisticated in ways that children may enjoy instinctively without fully articulating. Jennifer Lynn Barnes has cited this book as a direct influence, and reading them in conversation with each other illuminates how much the genre has evolved while its core pleasures have remained constant.
Truly Devious
Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious is the book I most frequently recommend to readers who loved the boarding school atmosphere of The Inheritance Games and want it pushed further toward gothic. Ellingham Academy in Vermont was founded by a tycoon who adored games and riddles, and shortly after its opening in the 1930s, his wife and daughter were kidnapped in a case that was never solved. Decades later, Stevie Bell, a true-crime obsessive with genuine clinical anxiety, enrolls with the explicit intention of solving the cold case.
What Johnson does brilliantly is refuse to let the mystery flatten her protagonist into a genre function. Stevie’s anxiety is not a character quirk deployed for relatability; it actively shapes how she processes evidence and navigates social dynamics. The dual-timeline structure, braiding the 1930s kidnapping with the contemporary investigation, creates a formal tension that compounds the narrative tension beautifully. The series ran to five volumes and sustained its quality across the full arc, which is rarer than it should be.
The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club is something of an anomaly on this list: it is an adult novel, populated by characters in their seventies and eighties who live in a retirement village in Kent, England, and it is genuinely, ceaselessly funny. I include it here because the puzzle mechanics are among the most intellectually satisfying in contemporary fiction, and because the four protagonists approach mystery-solving with the same combination of strategic brilliance and gleeful irreverence that the Hawthorne grandsons bring to their riddles.
What distinguishes Osman’s approach is his understanding that the smartest person in a room is almost never the one performing intelligence most visibly. His characters process information obliquely, through social observation and the accumulated pattern-recognition of long experience. If you are a reader who found the Hawthorne brothers’ elaborate game-playing seductive but wants to read something that sits on the adult side of the shelf, The Thursday Murder Club will reward you handsomely.
Ready Player One
Ernest Cline’s novel is a more contested recommendation than the others in this section, and I want to be honest about its limitations before making my case for it. The prose is functional rather than memorable, the romantic subplot is underdeveloped, and the pop-culture saturation can feel claustrophobic to readers who did not grow up worshipping the same 1980s touchstones that Cline did.
And yet. The central pleasure of Ready Player One is identical to the central pleasure of The Inheritance Games: a set of puzzles left behind by an eccentric billionaire, a contest with enormous stakes, and a protagonist who possesses the specific constellation of knowledge and intuition needed to crack the code. The OASIS, Wade Watts’s virtual reality refuge, functions as Hawthorne House’s digital equivalent: a space designed to reward the attentive and frustrate the superficial. For readers whose primary attachment to The Inheritance Games is the treasure-hunt structure rather than the familial psychology, this is the book.
Readers Who Demand a Protagonist Who Outfoxes Everyone, Including the Reader
Avery Grambs is not a passive inheritor. She decodes, resists, challenges, and refuses to be reduced to a plot device in someone else’s game. That quality, a female protagonist who is smarter than the people who underestimate her and self-aware enough to know it, is specific and valuable, and the books below share it.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
Holly Jackson’s debut novel arrived in 2019 and has since sold millions of copies across the globe, though I think its reputation as a “propulsive thriller” slightly undersells its technical sophistication. Pip Fitz-Amobi investigates a closed murder case as an extended-project assignment for school: five years earlier, the popular Andie Bell was allegedly murdered by her boyfriend Sal Singh, who subsequently died by apparent suicide. Pip is not convinced.
What Jackson accomplishes that relatively few YA mystery writers manage is a genuine feeling of investigative process. Pip does not intuit the truth; she builds toward it through interviews, document analysis, and the kind of methodical cross-referencing that actual investigators perform. The procedural authenticity makes the revelations, when they arrive, feel earned rather than convenient. The novel also refuses to let small-town complicity off the hook: the community’s willingness to accept a convenient narrative about Sal rather than a difficult one about itself is one of Jackson’s most pointed observations.
One of Us Is Lying
Karen M. McManus’s debut novel distilled the locked-room mystery into its most propulsive contemporary form: five students walk into detention, and only four walk out. The victim, Simon, ran a gossip app that threatened to expose each of the survivors. Every one of them had motive. The novel cycles through four first-person perspectives, and McManus manages each voice with enough distinction that the structural device never becomes a gimmick.
What I appreciate about One of Us Is Lying is that McManus treats her characters’ secrets with genuine respect for their complexity. The secrets are not arbitrary; they illuminate the specific pressures placed on teenagers in an achievement-obsessed suburban environment, and the investigation forces each character to confront the gap between their public persona and their actual self. That psychological dimension elevates the book above the pure mechanics of its premise.
Ace of Spades
Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s debut, published in 2021, announced a distinctive and politically uncompromising voice in YA fiction. Ace of Spades is set in an elite British prep school where two Black students, Devon and Chiamaka, begin receiving anonymous messages that threaten to expose their secrets. The novel is structured as a thriller but functions as a searing critique of institutional racism: the “game” being played against the protagonists is not merely personal but systemic, and Àbíké-Íyímídé is precise about how elite institutions protect themselves by weaponizing the vulnerabilities of those they have nominally admitted.
This is a darker, angrier book than The Inheritance Games, and intentionally so. If Avery Grambs’s crisis is fundamentally about figuring out whom to trust inside a game with obscure rules, Devon and Chiamaka’s crisis is about surviving an institution that has always intended them to fail. Readers who want their mystery thriller to carry moral urgency alongside narrative propulsion will find Ace of Spades essential.
The Naturals
Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s own earlier series deserves a place on this list precisely because it demonstrates the range of her talents before she refined them into the engine of The Inheritance Games. Cassie Hobbes is recruited into a classified FBI program that uses teenagers with exceptional cognitive abilities to profile cold cases. The “found family” dynamic, the impossible competence of the adolescent protagonists, and the propulsive chapter structure are all recognizably Barnes, but the FBI procedural frame gives The Naturals a different kind of urgency.
I find it instructive to read The Naturals and The Inheritance Games in dialogue because they reveal something about Barnes’s consistent preoccupations: the child who has internalized an adult’s cognitive methodology without fully processing its emotional costs, and the way exceptional intelligence can simultaneously be a superpower and a form of isolation.
Readers Captivated by Games That Escalate Into Something Sinister
Part of what makes The Inheritance Games so effective is its escalation logic. What begins as an eccentric inheritance dispute reveals itself to be something far more dangerous as the series progresses. The books below share that quality of a game that keeps raising its own stakes.
Caraval
Stephanie Garber’s Caraval operates in a register that is explicitly magical rather than realistic, but its thematic DNA is closely related to Barnes’s work: an immersive, rule-defying competition in which the boundary between game and reality keeps dissolving. Scarlett Dragna and her sister Tella attend Caraval, a legendary performance that turns its participants into players, and when Tella goes missing, Scarlett must follow clues through a world in which nothing is what it appears to be and trust is a luxury she cannot afford.
Garber’s prose is more ornate than Barnes’s; she is committed to a sensory richness that Barnes mostly sacrifices in favor of pace. That is not a criticism of either approach but an observation about what each writer prioritizes. For readers who want their mystery-game narrative drenched in atmosphere, Caraval is the book.
Thieves’ Gambit
Kayvion Lewis’s debut, published in 2023, is one of the sharpest recent additions to the high-stakes-competition subgenre. Ross Quest is a master thief who finds herself inducted into the Thieves’ Gambit, a series of brutal international heists in which the grand prize is a single wish. The novel pairs its rivals-to-lovers tension with genuine strategic complexity: the heists require planning, improvisation, and a willingness to betray the people you are beginning to trust.
What distinguishes Lewis’s approach is her protagonist’s moral clarity about her own moral ambiguity. Ross is not haunted by being a thief; she is competent, professional, and honest with herself about the compromises she makes. That self-possession makes her a more interesting character than the reluctant heroes who populate much of the genre, and her relationship with her rival develops with the kind of slow, earned intensity that makes romance feel like a genuine emotional discovery rather than a narrative obligation.
Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows is the book I most frequently recommend to readers who have finished The Inheritance Games and want something with more structural complexity and a larger ensemble. Six criminals with complementary skill sets attempt the most dangerous heist in the history of their world: breaking into an impregnable prison to extract a scientist who holds a secret that could destabilize global power.
The ensemble structure allows Bardugo to distribute the puzzle-solving across multiple perspectives, and each character’s contribution to the plan reflects their specific expertise and psychological wound. The novel rewards rereading in the same way that The Inheritance Games rewards rereading: the clues placed early in the narrative accumulate meaning retroactively, and the planning sequences are constructed with a precision that makes the eventual execution feel both surprising and inevitable.
Readers Who Want the Darkness Behind Elite Doors
The Inheritance Games is fundamentally optimistic in ways that the books below are not. Barnes believes, or at least allows her readers to believe, that intelligence and perseverance can navigate the inherited structures of wealth and privilege. The novels in this section are less certain.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt’s debut novel remains one of the most formally sophisticated thrillers written in the American idiom in the past four decades. A group of classics students at a small Vermont college commit a murder together and then spend the novel unraveling under the weight of what they have done. Tartt begins with the murder and works backward, which means that the tension is never about what will happen but about understanding why and how.
I include The Secret History on a list anchored by a YA novel because I believe strongly that readers who genuinely love The Inheritance Games are ready for it, regardless of their age. Tartt’s portrait of a closed intellectual world that operates by its own moral code is the adult version of the elite-institution novels that populate the YA landscape, and the questions she asks about complicity, aesthetic seduction, and the self-deceptions of brilliant people are questions that The Inheritance Games raises in a gentler register.
If We Were Villains
M.L. Rio’s debut, published in 2017, is often described as “dark academia” before that term acquired its current cultural saturation, and it holds up beautifully on its own terms. Seven Shakespearean theater students at an elite conservatory share a house, a language, and a set of performances that gradually blur the line between the roles they play and the people they are. When one of them is found dead, the investigation forces the survivors to decide how much of the truth they can afford to tell.
Rio’s prose is distinctive: she writes these characters in a heightened, literary register that reflects the world they inhabit. They quote Shakespeare not affectedly but reflexively, because Shakespeare is the grammar of their emotional lives. The novel takes that conceit seriously and extracts from it a genuine meditation on performance, identity, and the way artistic immersion can become a form of moral evasion. For readers who appreciated the Hawthorne brothers’ elaborate game-playing but want it filtered through a more literary and tragic sensibility, If We Were Villains is essential.
Genuine Fraud
E. Lockhart appears on this list twice because she deserves to. Genuine Fraud, published in 2017, is her most formally audacious work: a novel told in reverse chronology, beginning with the aftermath and moving steadily backward toward the origin point, each chapter pulling the rug out from under everything the previous chapter established.
The novel follows two young women, Imogen and Jule, whose friendship is built on performance and concealment. Lockhart does not explain who is deceiving whom until the structure itself makes it undeniable, and by that point, the reader has been so thoroughly implicated in the deceptions that the revelation lands with an almost personal sting. For readers who loved the unreliable textures of The Inheritance Games and want them pushed to their absolute limit, Genuine Fraud is the logical destination.
A Final Note on the Genre Barnes Has Shaped
Looking at the seventeen books I have assembled here, what strikes me most is the range of tonal registers and formal ambitions they represent. Jennifer Lynn Barnes did not invent the eccentric-billionaire puzzle mystery; Ellen Raskin got there in 1978. But Barnes did something equally significant: she demonstrated to a generation of readers and writers that the genre could sustain sustained moral complexity, genuine romantic investment, and propulsive plotting simultaneously, without sacrificing any of the three. The books on this list are evidence of that demonstration’s reach.
The Inheritance Games series has now expanded well beyond its original trilogy, with Games Untold (2024) and The Grandest Game (2024) extending the Hawthorne universe, and a Lionsgate television adaptation in development with Barnes producing. Whatever that adaptation ultimately becomes, it will arrive for an audience that has already internalized the series’ particular combination of pleasures, which is the best possible condition for an adaptation to inherit.
My recommendation, if you are standing at the end of the Hawthorne universe and wondering where to turn: start with We Were Liars, because it is the closest in emotional register; follow with Truly Devious for the puzzle architecture; then read The Secret History when you are ready to ask harder questions about what these closed worlds of wealth and intelligence cost the people who inhabit them. That is a reading progression that will leave you richer in the only way that actually counts.