Books like Leigh Bardugo

Locke Lamora is the natural next obsession for anyone who delighted in Kaz Brekker’s audacity. Locke leads a close-knit band of con artists whose schemes depend on disguises, improvisation, and each member knowing exactly when to play their part. The pleasure lies not merely in whether a plan succeeds, but in watching clever people build it—and then think furiously when reality tears it apart.

Lynch pairs intricate deception with profane, exuberant banter and a friendship of extraordinary warmth. Beneath the swagger, this is a novel about what loyalty costs when the world discovers where you are vulnerable. A modern fantasy favorite with an intensely devoted readership, it delivers the rare combination of ingenious plotting and genuine emotional bruising.

Galadriel Higgins has the abrasive voice, formidable power, and carefully concealed decency that make Bardugo’s most guarded characters so compelling. She attends a magical school with no teachers and a horrifying mortality rate, where every alliance is transactional—until repeated acts of trust begin turning survival partners into something dangerously like friends.

Novik makes social calculation feel as tense as combat: El must constantly judge who has resources, who owes whom, and whether doing the right thing will get her killed. Her furious narration is extremely funny, while the slow dismantling of her isolation gives the book its heart. The opening volume of the acclaimed Scholomance trilogy, it turns a hostile system and an apparently unlikable heroine into an irresistible story of solidarity.

Read this for the element many imitators of Six of Crows miss: the sense that a group of sharply distinct characters is becoming indispensable to one another. Blue Sargent falls in with four boys bound together by friendship, secrets, and an obsessive search. Their chemistry is wonderfully specific—privilege chafes against poverty, bravado masks fear, and jokes become a private language of loyalty.

Stiefvater favors yearning and uncanny atmosphere over breakneck action, but she shares Bardugo’s gift for charged silences, restrained romance, and damaged young people who recognize one another before they fully understand themselves. The Raven Cycle inspired lasting reader devotion because its friendships feel less like plot machinery than a place one desperately wants to belong. By the end, these characters will seem like people you have known—and miss.

Sasha is coerced into attending an obscure institute where impossible assignments and terrifying consequences replace ordinary lessons. Like Alex Stern, she enters an institution whose authorities know far more than they will explain—and discovers that education can be a form of violation.

This cult favorite of translated speculative fiction captures Ninth House’s most unsettling idea: secret knowledge does not merely empower you; it changes what you are. Colder, stranger, and increasingly metaphysical, Vita Nostra makes every exam feel like a confrontation with reality itself. Few novels make learning seem so genuinely dangerous.

Carolyn was raised with eleven other children by a godlike, monstrously abusive man, each child assigned one portion of his supernatural knowledge. When their teacher disappears, the resulting struggle is part mystery, part revenge story, and part cosmic coup.

Readers drawn to Alex’s survival-honed intelligence and Bardugo’s refusal to prettify trauma will recognize the book’s savage pulse. Hawkins pairs brutality with audacious imagination and bone-dry comedy, then keeps enlarging the story without losing sight of its damaged heroine. The Library at Mount Char has earned an unusually devoted readership because it feels like discovering a mythology no one had previously dared to write down.

Detective Cassie Maddox is sent undercover after a murdered woman is found carrying her old alias—and looking exactly like her. Cassie enters the dead woman’s life among a close-knit group of graduate students in a crumbling country house, where affection and suspicion become almost impossible to separate.

There is no literal magic here, yet French understands the deeper enchantment of Ninth House: the desire to cross a guarded threshold and be chosen by the people inside. Her psychological suspense is exquisitely patient, attentive to class, self-invention, and the lies institutions and families tell to preserve themselves. One of French’s most passionately loved novels, The Likeness turns an investigation into a haunting question: what if the false life fits better than your own?