Books like
Pretty Little Liars

Five students walk into detention and only four walk out alive. The dead student ran a gossip app that was about to expose secrets from each of them, which makes every survivor a suspect. Karen M. McManus built this book on the same foundation that makes Pretty Little Liars work: a group of teenagers whose carefully maintained images are one revelation away from collapse.

Sara Shepard wrote this as what amounts to PLL's sister series, and the DNA is unmistakable. Emma Paxton discovers she has an identical twin named Sutton Mercer who rules the social scene in wealthy Scottsdale, Arizona. When Sutton vanishes, Emma steps into her life and must navigate a world of frenemies, loyalty tests, and secrets that could get her killed.

Three girls at a prestigious Manhattan ballet academy compete for the lead role, and someone is willing to sabotage, manipulate, and destroy to claim it. Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton tell the story through alternating perspectives, and each narrator is hiding something that could end her career. The social hierarchy here is even more rigid than Rosewood's because the ranking is literal.

A group of friends goes on spring break to Aruba, and when one of them turns up dead, the victim's best friend becomes the prime suspect. Abigail Haas structures the book through flashbacks that reveal just how complicated and toxic the friendship really was. On the surface, these girls were inseparable. Underneath, there was jealousy, competition, and resentment that nobody talked about openly.

Pip Fitz-Amobi reopens a closed murder case in her small town for a school project, and what she finds threatens to expose secrets that half the community would rather keep buried. Holly Jackson built this story on the same principle that powers PLL: a pleasant suburban town where everyone knows each other and nobody is telling the whole truth. As Pip interviews suspects and follows leads, she discovers that the people she grew up around have been lying about who they are and what they have done.

Kay Donovan is a star soccer player whose popular clique controls their elite boarding school. When a girl is found dead by the lake, the victim has left Kay a coded scavenger hunt that begins to implicate everyone around her, including Kay herself. The dead girl sending messages from beyond is the closest structural parallel to A that exists in YA fiction. Someone who is gone but still pulling strings, still forcing secrets into the light, still making the living pay for what they have done.

Addy and Beth are co-captains of their cheerleading squad, locked in the kind of intense, codependent friendship where love and control are impossible to separate. When a new coach disrupts their power dynamic and a suspicious death follows, the two girls are pulled into a web of loyalty tests, dangerous secrets, and adult corruption that their suburban world was supposed to protect them from. Megan Abbott writes teenage girl friendships with a psychological sharpness that makes most YA authors look like they are skimming the surface.