Books like The Naturals

Pip Fitz-Amobi picks a closed murder case as her senior project and systematically dismantles the accepted narrative. Holly Jackson structures the story through interview transcripts, research logs, and Pip's own analysis, which gives it a procedural feel that fans of The Naturals will love. Pip has that same driven quality as Cassie.

She cannot leave a puzzle unsolved, even when the answers start putting her in danger. The mystery is genuinely well constructed with real misdirection and a satisfying payoff. I recommend this to everyone who loved The Naturals because it scratches the same itch.

A smart teen protagonist who takes investigation seriously, real stakes, and a community full of people with something to hide.

Five students walk into detention. Only four walk out alive. Each survivor has a motive for wanting the fifth student dead.

Karen McManus gives you four distinct narrators, each hiding something significant, and lets you try to figure out who is lying before the reveal. The ensemble cast dynamic mirrors The Naturals perfectly. You have a group of teenagers, each with their own personality and perspective, thrown together by circumstance and forced to navigate trust and suspicion simultaneously.

The plotting is tight, the red herrings are well placed, and the character work makes you care about the outcome beyond just solving the puzzle. It is also a quick, addictive read. The kind of book you start on a Saturday morning and finish before dinner.

Stevie Bell is obsessed with true crime and gets into Ellingham Academy, an elite Vermont boarding school with a famous unsolved kidnapping from the 1930s. Maureen Johnson alternates between Stevie's present-day investigation and the historical crime, building two mysteries simultaneously. The boarding school setting creates the same kind of contained, high-pressure environment as the Naturals house.

Stevie is surrounded by brilliant, eccentric students who all might be connected to the old case. Johnson writes detective thinking well. You see Stevie work through evidence, form theories, hit dead ends, and adjust.

It feels like watching a real investigation unfold rather than a character magically arriving at the right answer. The series builds across three books with excellent payoff.

Jazz is the son of the most prolific serial killer in American history. His father taught him how to read people, how to manipulate, how to think like a predator. Now Jazz uses those skills to help police catch a new killer.

The psychological edge here is darker than The Naturals, but the core concept is similar. A teenager who understands criminal minds in ways that disturb the adults around him. Jazz constantly wrestles with whether his abilities make him a hero or prove he is just like his father.

Barry Lyga does not shy away from the implications of having these skills. The investigation scenes are strong, and the tension between Jazz's desire to be good and his awareness of his own capacity for violence adds a layer that keeps the story compelling beyond the whodunit.

Barnes wrote this after The Naturals, and you can feel the evolution in her craft. Avery Grambs, a nobody from nothing, inherits a billionaire's fortune and must survive in a mansion full of puzzles, rivalries, and four grandsons who each want the inheritance for themselves. While the setting shifts from FBI to old money, the core appeal is identical.

A sharp female protagonist dropped into a high-stakes environment where everyone around her has secrets and she must use her intelligence to survive. The puzzle elements are excellent. Barnes constructs layered riddles that reward careful reading.

And the Hawthorne brothers are the kind of complex, competitive characters that recall the Naturals team. If you loved how Barnes balances mystery, romance, and ensemble dynamics, this is her doing it again at an even higher level.

Six friends on a road trip. An RV that will not start. A sniper in the dark who knows one of them is hiding something. Holly Jackson strips away everything except tension and secrets, creating a locked-room thriller that takes place over a single night.

The pacing here is relentless. Jackson keeps tightening the screws as each character's secrets surface under pressure. Like The Naturals, the strength is in the group dynamics. These friends think they know each other, but fear and survival instinct reveal how much they have been hiding.

The contained setting forces constant interaction and confrontation. It is a faster, more intense read than The Naturals, but fans of Barnes will appreciate how Jackson uses the same building blocks. Smart teens, escalating danger, and the question of who you can trust when everything falls apart.

November is shipped off to a secretive boarding school where students are descended from the world's greatest spies, strategists, and assassins. When students start dying, she has to figure out the rules of a world she never knew existed. The spy academy setting gives Killing November a different flavor from The Naturals, but the core is the same.

A girl dropped into an environment where everyone around her has been trained for something dangerous, and she has to catch up fast. Mather creates a paranoid atmosphere where alliances shift constantly and no one says exactly what they mean. The mystery builds well across the book, and the school itself is a great setting.

Fans of The Naturals who want something with a more international espionage angle will find a lot to like here. The sequel, Hunting November, raises the stakes even further.

Brittany Cavallaro's A Study in Charlotte is the boarding-school detective series Naturals readers reach for when they want a sharp, prickly girl genius at the center. Charlotte Holmes is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Sherlock, and she has inherited the deduction, the moods, and the habits nobody warns Jamie Watson about when he lands a rugby scholarship at the same Connecticut prep school.

The two of them are pushed together by a campus death staged to echo the old Holmes cases, and Jamie narrates the whole thing with a rugby player's bewilderment at how Charlotte reads a room. Cavallaro writes the deductive method Naturals fans love, the reading of small physical tells to reconstruct a crime, and pairs it with the same needling partner chemistry Barnes builds between Cassie and the boys of the program.

Recommended for readers who want the profiling brain transposed onto a modern Holmes with a debut that reads fast and mean.

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé's Where Sleeping Girls Lie is the dark-academia mystery for Naturals readers who love the boarding-school setting as much as the sleuthing. Sade Hussein arrives at the elite Alfred Nobel Academy after years of being homeschooled, and her roommate Elizabeth vanishes the morning after Sade's very first night.

With whispers already circling the new girl, Sade gets pulled into the orbit of a clique the campus calls the Unholy Trinity, and the deeper she digs into Elizabeth's disappearance the more of the school's buried machinery she uncovers. Àbíké-Íyímídé writes the same outsider-detective momentum Barnes gives Cassie, a girl reading a closed institution she does not fully belong to, and she layers in the grief and the rot underneath a glossy campus.

Recommended for Naturals readers who want the boarding-school atmosphere turned up and a mystery that keeps widening as it goes.

Ellie Marney's None Shall Sleep is the closest structural cousin to The Naturals on this list, built on the same idea that a teenager can be recruited to get inside a killer's head. Set in 1982, it follows Emma Lewis, who survived a serial killer, and Travis Bell, whose father was murdered by one, as the FBI brings them in to interview incarcerated juvenile murderers.

The premise mirrors the Barnes program almost beat for beat, gifted teens using their proximity to violence as a professional skill, except Marney leans into the Silence of the Lambs procedural register and the period detail of early behavioral-science profiling. When a captured killer starts steering the interviews toward one who is still loose, the stakes turn personal fast.

Recommended for Naturals readers who want the exact FBI-teen-profiler premise pushed darker and older, with a period spin and a slow ratchet of dread.

Kara Thomas's The Cheerleaders is the underrated small-town cold-case thriller Naturals readers devour and then push on everyone they know. Five years ago the town of Sunnybrook lost its entire cheer squad in a run of accidents, murders, and a suicide, and the school buried the whole thing along with the girls.

Monica's sister was the last to die, and when Monica finds an old cell phone and a stack of letters hidden in her stepfather's desk, she starts pulling on a story the adults around her closed years ago. Thomas writes the same cold-case obsession that drives A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and The Naturals, a teenager reopening a case everyone else wants forgotten, and she builds toward a reveal that reframes the whole book.

Hidden gem because Thomas never got the BookTok wave that lifted her peers. Recommended for Naturals readers who want a tight, twisty standalone with real emotional weight.

Kara Thomas's Little Monsters is the twisty missing-girl thriller Naturals readers who love an unreliable narrator should reach for. Kacey moved to the small town of Broken Falls to live with the father she barely knew, and she was quickly folded into a tight friend group with Bailey and Jade. Then the group cools on her, she gets frozen out of the biggest party of the year, and Bailey never comes home from it.

As every passing day stacks more suspicion onto the new girl in town, Kacey has to sort out what really happened and how much of her own account she can trust. Thomas layers in diary entries and shifting perspectives that keep the reader off balance, the same needling doubt Barnes builds when Cassie starts questioning the people around her. Hidden gem because it flew under the radar between Thomas's flashier releases.

Recommended for Naturals readers who want a small-town mystery where the narrator herself is a question mark.

K.A. Cobell's Looking for Smoke is the 2024 debut Naturals readers reach for when they want the One of Us Is Lying suspect-pool structure with real stakes underneath it.

During the annual Indian Days celebration on the Blackfeet reservation, four teenagers discover the body of a murdered girl, Loren, and each of the four is tied to her in a way that makes them a suspect. Cobell, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation, rotates through all four perspectives, spreading suspicion evenly and keeping armchair sleuths guessing while she grounds the whole book in the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The result reads like the ensemble-mystery structure Naturals fans know, sharpened by a setting and a subject the genre rarely gives this weight.

Released in July 2024 as a Reese's YA Book Club pick. Recommended for Naturals readers who want a recent, multi-suspect thriller that hits harder than the usual whodunit.

Mackenzie Reed's The Wilde Trials is the 2025 dark-academia thriller Naturals readers who loved Killing November should put next in line. Chloe Gatti needs the prize money to help her sick sister, so she competes in Wilde Academy's annual senior contest, seven brutal physical and mental tests staged across a crumbling estate for half a million dollars. Her rivals include her brooding ex, Hayes Stratford, whose brother was the only competitor ever to die in the Trials.

When a blackmailer starts targeting Chloe mid-competition, she strikes a deal with Hayes, trading help finding her saboteur for help solving what really happened to his brother. Reed threads riddles, hidden passageways, and a locked-estate atmosphere through the whole thing, the same deadly-game-inside-an-elite-school pull Barnes fans know. Released January 2025.

Recommended for Naturals readers who want a recent, romance-laced competition thriller with a mystery buried at its center.