The Inheritance Games

Sixteen heirs are invited into a dead man's elaborate game, and clues in the will turn a possible fortune into a puzzle. The Westing Game is the clearest classic ancestor to Avery's situation: a wealthy stranger designs an inheritance contest that makes every player suspect the others. Raskin uses a broad ensemble and wordplay instead of the Hawthorne brothers' romance and high-gloss mansion drama. It is shorter and aimed at younger readers, but the pleasure of testing every instruction for a second meaning is very close.

Stevie Bell comes to Ellingham Academy determined to solve an old kidnapping, only to find a new death complicating her investigation. Truly Devious shares The Inheritance Games' pleasure in clues embedded in a wealthy institution and in a clever teen refusing to accept the official version. The school setting and interwoven historical case create a slower, more procedural puzzle; there is no unexpected inheritance or family of competing brothers. Choose it when Avery's clue-solving mattered more than the billionaire fantasy.

Pip Fitz-Amobi reopens a local murder case for a school project and finds that the accepted story leaves dangerous gaps. A Good Girl's Guide to Murder gives an inventive teenage investigator a trail of documents, interviews, and risks outside adult control. Avery solves a dead billionaire's designed puzzles; Pip challenges a real community's certainty about a crime. The tone grows darker and the format feels more like a case file. Read it if you want an active heroine following evidence wherever it leads.

Cassie can read people unusually well, so the FBI brings her into a program for gifted teens helping with unsolved cases. The Naturals is Jennifer Lynn Barnes writing another group of sharp young people whose talents create both closeness and danger. It has the banter and shifting trust that make Hawthorne House fun, but its crimes are serial-killer investigations rather than a puzzle inheritance. Choose it for the author's quick plotting and teen ensemble, while expecting more violence and a law-enforcement frame.

Five students enter detention and one dies, leaving the others to explain what happened while their secrets come out. One of Us Is Lying gives the reader a tight group whose motives can be read several ways, much like the Hawthorne household around Avery. The mystery is a death at school, not a benefactor's game, and the alternating suspects replace Avery's outsider view. It is a stronger choice for interpersonal suspicion and YA suspense than for treasure-hunt clues or a lavish estate.