Jennifer Lynn Barnes published The Inheritance Games in 2020, and it did something that a lot of YA mystery tries and fails to do: it made a will reading feel like a heist. Avery Grambs is seventeen, effectively broke, and has never met Tobias Hawthorne — the eccentric billionaire who nonetheless leaves her almost his entire fortune, on one condition. She has to live in Hawthorne House for a year. With his four grandsons. Who were supposed to inherit everything and got nothing. Who have no idea why a stranger just took their family’s future, and who are, individually and collectively, furious, brilliant, and extremely hot about it.
What Barnes builds from that premise is a puzzle-box novel in the most literal sense. Hawthorne House is riddled with secret passages, hidden safes, and riddles inscribed in the woodwork — because Tobias Hawthorne built his fortune designing puzzles and raised his grandsons to solve them compulsively, as a way of life. Every chapter peels back another layer of why Avery, specifically, was chosen, and the answer, when it finally arrives, recontextualizes everything that came before it without cheating the reader. Layered over the mystery is the found-family warmth of four brothers who did not choose each other’s company and can’t seem to stop needing it anyway, plus a slow-simmering rivalry between two of them for Avery’s attention that never tips into anything as simple as a love triangle.
The book hangover this leaves is specific: you want a puzzle you can actually solve alongside the protagonist, a family with more money and more secrets than should be legal, and the particular high of watching an underestimated girl out-think everyone in the room. You also want the tension between Grayson’s controlled hostility and Jameson’s reckless charm to matter — Barnes never resolves that pull cheaply, and readers spend three books arguing about which brother deserves Avery’s attention without either camp fully winning.
This list maps those elements to books that deliver them — some newer, some genre-defining classics, one deliberately for readers who want the same story with adult stakes. Not every book here has a puzzle box literally built into a mansion’s walls. But each one earns its place by matching a specific piece of what made The Inheritance Games impossible to put down.
Before you go looking elsewhere: The Hawthorne Legacy (2021) and The Final Gambit (2022) complete Avery’s trilogy, and Barnes does not let the momentum drop. The Hawthorne Legacy digs into Tobias Hawthorne’s most carefully buried secret yet — a connection to Avery’s own past that the first book only gestured toward — while The Final Gambit forces Avery to play the most dangerous game in the house against an opponent who has been three steps ahead the entire series. Both books keep the puzzle density high and the Grayson-versus-Jameson tension unresolved until it has genuinely earned its resolution.
If you want more Hawthorne after that: The Brothers Hawthorne (2023) is a direct sequel following Grayson and Jameson years later, on a new mission with real physical stakes layered onto the family’s habitual scheming. And The Grandest Game (2024) opens an entirely new puzzle in the same universe, with new characters and a new impossible inheritance to unravel — read it once you’re ready to meet a fresh set of players instead of revisiting Avery’s.
The Westing Game (1978) by Ellen Raskin is the book that proved an inheritance could be structured as an actual game — decades before Barnes did it for a new generation. Eccentric millionaire Samuel W. Westing is dead, and sixteen heirs, strangers to each other, are summoned to his mansion and paired off into teams, each given a set of cryptic clues and a share of the fortune riding on whoever solves the mystery of his death first.
If Hawthorne House’s riddles and hidden compartments are what hooked you, Raskin’s novel is the direct ancestor: a puzzle constructed with genuine fairness, where every clue that seems like a red herring turns out to matter, and the solution rewards readers who paid close attention rather than readers who guessed. It won the Newbery Medal for a reason. Short, sharp, and endlessly rereadable, it’s the book that taught generations of readers to love a will with strings attached.
We Were Liars (2014) by E. Lockhart trades Hawthorne House for a private island owned by the old-money Sinclair family, but the emotional architecture is nearly identical: a wealthy patriarch whose approval structures everyone’s life, grandchildren circling each other with love that’s tangled up in competition for what he’ll leave behind, and a truth so carefully hidden that the novel itself withholds it from you until the exact right moment.
Cadence Sinclair Eastman can’t remember what happened the summer she turned fifteen, and Lockhart’s prose — spare, fractured, occasionally verging on prose poetry — makes piecing that memory back together feel as urgent as any of Avery’s discoveries about Tobias Hawthorne’s true motives. This is a shorter, sadder book than The Inheritance Games, and the reveal lands as devastation rather than triumph. If you want the wealthy-family-secret structure taken to its most literary, most heartbreaking extreme, this is where you go.
Part of what makes Avery compelling is that she’s not a trained investigator — she’s just relentlessly, methodically smart, and she treats the mystery of Hawthorne House like a problem that can be solved if she refuses to stop pulling threads. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (2019) by Holly Jackson gives you that exact energy in a different genre.
Pippa Fitz-Amobi picks a five-years-cold murder case for her senior capstone project, certain the boy who was convicted and later died by suicide was actually innocent. What follows is procedural in the best way: interview transcripts, timelines, and evidence logs interspersed with the narrative as Pip builds her case piece by piece, and the town’s reaction to her digging turns from indulgent to genuinely dangerous. If you loved watching Avery out-strategize four Hawthorne brothers with nothing but her own persistence, Pip’s investigation will scratch the same itch — and the trilogy only gets darker from here.
The Hawthorne brothers work because each one is a fully realized suspect in his own right — someone with motive, capability, and a plausible reason to have been the one orchestrating things behind Avery’s back. One of Us Is Lying (2017) by Karen M. McManus builds an entire novel on that same architecture: five students walk into detention, one never walks out, and the four survivors — the brain, the jock, the beauty queen, the criminal — each have a reason to have wanted him dead, and each are hiding something that isn’t what the reader assumes.
Truly Devious (2018) by Maureen Johnson adds the puzzle-box layer back in: Stevie Bell enrolls at an elite Vermont boarding school specifically to reopen a decades-old unsolved kidnapping and murder, and the campus itself is littered with the same kind of coded riddles and architectural secrets that make Hawthorne House so addictive to explore. Its sequel, Nine Liars (2022), keeps Stevie’s cold-case obsession going with the same code-breaking rigor. Read both series for the specific pleasure of an ensemble where everyone is a suspect and no one is telling you the whole truth.
The Cousins (2020), also by Karen M. McManus, is the book that most directly echoes Avery’s exact situation. Milly, Aubrey, and Jonah Story receive a letter from the grandmother who disinherited their parents decades ago, inviting them to spend the summer working at her private island resort — no explanation given. What they find is a family built on decades of secrets, a will that nobody entirely understands, and a mystery about why their grandmother cut their parents off in the first place that unravels in directions none of them expect.
It’s the closest thing on this list to The Inheritance Games’ core premise of “wealthy stranger’s decision reshapes your entire life, and finding out why becomes the whole plot.” If you want that structure with a different family and a different set of secrets, this is the one.
Part of Avery’s appeal is that she never stops being an outsider in Hawthorne House — poor among the ultra-rich, aware at every moment that she doesn’t belong there by any conventional measure, and using that awareness as an asset rather than a liability. Ace of Spades (2021) by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé sharpens that dynamic into something angrier and more explicitly political.
Devon and Chiamaka are the only two Black students at their elite prep school when an anonymous texter calling themselves Aces begins exposing their secrets to the entire student body, one by one. The novel is part thriller, part scathing indictment of the institutions Avery only ever gets to observe from the inside once she’s already rich — and it makes the class and power dynamics that The Inheritance Games treats as a fun puzzle explicit, weaponized, and considerably higher-stakes.
If you’ve aged out of YA but still want the exact premise — a family’s fortune contingent on winning an elaborate, rule-bound game designed by someone who is no longer around to explain it — The Family Game (2023) by Catherine Steadman is the grown-up version. Harriet is about to marry into the wealthy, secretive Holbeck family, and her introduction to them comes in the form of a videotape from her fiancé’s dead father, laying out a set of rules for a game the whole family is legally and financially bound to play.
Steadman writes with a thriller’s pacing rather than a YA mystery’s — the stakes escalate into genuinely dangerous territory, and the family’s secrets are darker and less redeemable than anything Tobias Hawthorne was hiding. But the bones are the same: an outsider stepping into old money’s orbit, a dead patriarch’s rules structuring everyone’s behavior from beyond the grave, and a game that turns out to have been designed with a very specific, very personal purpose all along. It’s the recommendation for readers who loved the premise of The Inheritance Games and want to see how dark that premise gets once the stakes stop being fun.
If you’re building your TBR from this list:
The Inheritance Games built its following on readers who wanted to solve the puzzle themselves, not just watch Avery solve it — and every book on this list rewards that same instinct to pay attention, distrust the obvious answer, and keep reading past the point where you thought you had it figured out.
Keep every puzzle-box mystery, every Hawthorne-universe sequel, and every readalike on this list sorted and tracked with Bookdot — the book tracker built for readers who refuse to lose the thread.
