12 Gripping Stories for Readers Who Love Suspenseful Books Like Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Another Swedish crime-writing sensation, this is an engrossing and suspenseful mystery about decades-old secrets and brutal murders in a small, Swedish fishing village. Erika Falck returns to her remote seaside hometown to find that her childhood best friend has died in an apparent suicide. Together with police detective Patrik Hedström, Erika begins to uncover shocking events from her friend’s childhood that someone out there is willing to kill to keep secret. 

If Lisbeth Salander is your favorite part of the MILLENNIUM series (isn’t she everyone’s?) then you should meet Jessica Jones. A previously costumed superhero who has fallen from grace, Jessica is now a hard-drinking, self-destructive private detective who specializes in superhuman cases. When she discovers a potentially explosive secret, her life is suddenly in danger. 

If you liked the dark mystery of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, pick up this unique twist on the serial killer novel. Harper Curtis is a serial killer with the ability to travel through time. He is hunting down “shining girls” throughout time, inserting himself into their lives, and killing them. But he doesn’t count on one of the girls, Kirby Mazrachi, surviving and embarking on a quest to bring him to justice. 

If you loved Mikael Blomkvist, pick up this page-turning thriller starring veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath. McGrath’s career was almost destroyed once when he attempted to expose reclusive cult-horror director Stanislas Cordova. When his daughter Ashley Cordova dies in an apparent suicide, McGrath suspects foul play and embarks on an investigation that will take him deeper into Cordova’s strange, eerie world and his cursed family dynasty. 

As girls, best friends Sarah and Jennifer kept a “Never List,” a collection of rules meant to keep them safe. But when they break the rules and accept a cab ride from a stranger, they end up held captive and tortured with two other girls in a basement for years. Ten years after escaping, Sarah is struggling to resume her life and get over the fact that Jennifer died in that basement. When her captor comes up for parole, Sarah reunited with her fellow victims, who have their own grudges against her, to try and uncover new evidence to keep him in jail. 

The night of the first snowfall of the year, a boy’s mother disappears. The only trace of her that remains is her pink scarf, worn by a snowman that has appeared in their front yard. Inspector Harry Hole is on the case, uncovering a string of disappearances over the past decade in which women disappear on the day of the first snow. But the killer is onto him and draws Harry even deeper into his twisted web. 

The Spellmans are a high-functioning yet extremely dysfunctional family of private detectives. Twenty-eight-year-old Izzy Spellman has a past littered with excessive drinking, vandalism, and invading others’ privacy. But when Izzy’s parents invade her privacy, she decides she needs to get out of the family business. But not before taking one last case: a cold missing person case that unexpectedly becomes the most important case of her life. 

If you simply can’t get enough of Lisbeth and Mikael, pick up this all-new adventure in graphic-novel format. Lisbeth and her intrepid group of outlaw hackers are set to expose the Swedish secret service’s files. But when one of their members is kidnapped, they must seek Mikael’s help. Their investigation leads them deep into an underworld of conspiracy and hatred, uncovering a hidden group known only as “Sparta.” 

If you’re intrigued by the hacker underworld in the Millennium series, read this thrilling memoir of a real-life hacker. Mitnick was the most elusive hacker in history, breaking into computers and networks of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies and people. However fast the authorities were in tracking him down, Mitnick was faster. But as the FBI’s net began to tighten, Kevin went on the run, engaging in an increasingly sophisticated cat-and-mouse game that led through false identities, a host of cities, plenty of close shaves, and to an ultimate showdown with the Feds, who would stop at nothing to bring him down. 

After a brief stay at a psych hospital, journalist Camille Preaker is assigned to cover the murders of two young girls in her hometown. This means she’ll have to reconnect with the deeply troubled mother she hasn’t spoken to in years and her half-sister, who she barely knows. Reckoning with her own demons, Camille must unravel the dark secrets of her own past in order to get the story and make it through this homecoming. 

On a dark, frozen winter night, a journalist is murdered in northern Sweden. Tabloid reporter Annika Bengtzon had been planning to interview him about a long-ago crime at a nearby airbase, and now wonders if the two events are connected. She begins to investigate and a fresh string of murders occurs. At the same time, Annika becomes convinced her husband is hiding something. 

If Lisbeth’s quest for revenge against all the men who have wronged her in her life sticks in your memory as much as mine, delve into Stephen King’s short story about another woman on a mission. After a mystery writer is brutally assaulted and left for dead by a truck driver on a back road, she plots to hunt him down and make him pay. In seeking revenge, she awakens a dark part of herself she never could have imagined.