Books Like Knives Out: 9 Whodunits Where Everyone’s a Suspect (2026)

Knives Out didn’t invent the whodunit. Agatha Christie did that almost a century ago. What Rian Johnson did was remind an entire generation why the formula works — and it has nothing to do with the mystery. It’s the cast. A dining room full of people who all have motive, all have secrets, and all have very strong opinions about who deserves the inheritance. You’re not watching for the reveal. You’re watching terrible people be terrible to each other while someone takes notes. If you’re looking for books like Knives Out, the good news is that the formula translates to the page better than almost any other kind of story.

I went to an event with Nathan Johnson, the composer who scored all three Knives Out films including Wake Up Dead Man, and he said something that nailed the whole genre for me: “The little secret with detective fiction [is] the detective is the lead but also not the main character. […] Each movie, we find our way into it through his sidekick. Blanc does have a couple motifs that peak their heads up through the different movies. I’m finding all new things to explore with the new characters.” What he’s pointing out is that normally you develop a story around your main character, but in a whodunit the protagonist is almost beside the point. Who people are really watching for is the quirky cast of characters — each with their own secrets, their own voice, their own goals, all butting heads while they’re trapped together trying to figure out which one of them is a killer. The cast of suspects IS the story.

That tracks with everything I know about comedy, too. Before I started writing thrillers, I did standup and improv five nights a week — first in Shanghai, then in Los Angeles. COVID shut the stages down and I pivoted to writing, but the comedy never left. My editor is always telling me, “We need to take this joke out — this scene is supposed to be scary.” The best whodunits work the same way improv does: you put a group of wildly different characters in a room, give each of them a secret, and watch them collide. Somebody ends up dead. The audience suspects everyone. The laughs come from watching the collision.

These 9 books nail that formula. Not just mystery novels with a twist at the end — specifically the trapped-ensemble-everyone’s-a-suspect energy that turned Knives Out and Glass Onion into cultural events. Whodunit books where the cast matters more than the corpse.

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9 Books Like Knives Out That’ll Make You Suspect Everyone at Your Next Dinner Party

1. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)

Ten strangers arrive on an island off the Devon coast, each invited under a different pretense. At dinner, a recorded voice accuses every single one of them of a past murder that escaped justice. Then they start dying — one by one, matching the verses of a nursery rhyme framed in each bedroom.

There’s no detective here. No Benoit Blanc sweeping in with a magnifying glass. Every character is both suspect and potential victim, and Christie gives each of them just enough backstory that you believe they could be the killer and just enough guilt that you’re not sure they don’t deserve what’s coming. The trapped-island setting became the template for every “no one can leave” mystery that followed, including Knives Out’s snowbound mansion.

If you’ve never read the book that sold over 100 million copies and invented the formula Rian Johnson modernized 85 years later, start here. The BBC adapted it in 2015, and it still holds up because Christie understood something fundamental about whodunit books: the killer isn’t the point. The paranoia is.

2. The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (2018)

Imagine Knives Out’s country estate, but the protagonist keeps reliving the same murder from eight different perspectives — waking up each morning in the body of a different party guest. Each host has different access, different secrets, different physical limitations. One is a butler. One is a drunk aristocrat. One can barely walk. The murder happens every night at 11pm regardless, and the protagonist has to piece together the truth by experiencing the same event through wildly different eyes.

This is the most architecturally ambitious ensemble mystery novel on this list. Stuart Turton builds a 1920s country house party full of liars, drunks, and schemers. The exact kind of dysfunctional rich people who populate a Knives Out dining room, except now you’re forced to see every one of them from the inside. The class commentary is baked into the structure itself: who has power at a party depends entirely on which body you’re wearing. If you want knives out book recommendations that push the whodunit formula into genuinely new territory, this is the one that reinvents it without losing what makes it work.

3. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (2020)

A group of old college friends reunites at a remote Scottish Highlands lodge for New Year’s Eve. They’re the kind of friend group that looks golden from the outside — glamorous careers, expensive coats, inside jokes that have calcified into weapons. Beneath the champagne toasts, there are affairs, resentments, and a class divide between the guests and the lodge staff that nobody acknowledges but everyone feels. Then someone turns up dead in the snow.

Foley rotates perspectives between the friends and the staff, building an ensemble where every character has a motive and every conversation has a subtext. The Scottish lodge functions the same way the Thrombey mansion does: a beautiful trap. No cell service, snowbound, miles from the nearest village. The rich friends can’t leave, and the staff can’t stop watching them self-destruct. If you liked Knives Out’s class commentary and the feeling that every person at the table is hiding something worth killing over, The Hunting Party is the closest thing in novel form. It’s also a strong companion to the funny mystery novels on this list — Foley’s wit cuts as deep as the cold.

4. An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena (2018)

A boutique hotel in the mountains loses power during a brutal winter storm. The roads are impassable. Cell phones are dead. The guests are stuck with each other, strangers who booked a quiet weekend retreat and are now trapped in something much worse. Then someone is found dead at the bottom of the staircase. Accident? Maybe. Until the next body turns up.

Lapena strips the whodunit formula to its bones: a group of people who don’t know each other, a location they can’t escape, and a body count that keeps climbing. Every guest has a secret — an affair, a past crime, a reason they chose this particular hotel at this particular time. The pacing is relentless. No chapter overstays its welcome. If And Then There Were None is the original template, An Unwanted Guest is the version for readers who want books like Knives Out but faster and meaner. Claustrophobic, paranoid, and everyone’s lying.

5. One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus (2017)

Five students walk into detention. The brain, the beauty, the criminal, the athlete, and the outcast — yes, it’s The Breakfast Club, but one of them doesn’t walk out alive. The dead kid ran a gossip app that was about to expose secrets from all four survivors: an affair, steroid use, a cheating scandal, and something worse. Every suspect has motive. Every suspect has something to lose.

McManus uses the high school hierarchy as her class system, the same power dynamics that drive the Thrombey family but filtered through cafeteria politics instead of inheritance law. Each character narrates their own chapters, and each voice is distinct enough that you genuinely can’t tell who’s lying. The whodunit formula works here because the ensemble carries it: you’re reading for the characters, not the solution.

Peacock adapted it into a series in 2021, and it became one of the most-read YA mysteries of the decade for the same reason Knives Out became a franchise: the cast is more fun than the crime. For more mystery books with dark humor in the YA-crossover space, McManus basically owns that corner of the genre.

6. The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse (2021)

A converted sanatorium turned luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps. The kind of place where the renovation is gorgeous and the history is horrifying — patients were sent there to die, and the architecture still feels like it remembers. Detective Elin Warner arrives for her brother’s engagement party, already uneasy. Then an avalanche seals every exit. Then a guest disappears. Then another.

Pearse gives you a detective figure who’s actively trying to solve the case while trapped with the suspects, closer to the Benoit Blanc model than most books like Knives Out on this list. The ensemble of hotel guests and staff each carry secrets tied to the sanatorium’s dark past, and the class tension between the hotel’s sleek rebrand and the suffering that happened in the same rooms gives the whole book an unsettling double identity. If Knives Out were set in a haunted ski resort where the walls have opinions, it would feel something like this. The isolation is the point: nobody’s leaving until the truth comes out or the snow melts — whichever comes first.

7. In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware (2015)

A hen party at an isolated glass house in the middle of a forest. The bride-to-be has invited her closest friends and one woman she hasn’t spoken to in a decade — our narrator, Nora, who has no idea why she was included. Old secrets, old rivalries, too much alcohol, and a house made entirely of windows in a place where no one can hear you scream. Someone ends up in the hospital. Someone else might be responsible. Nobody remembers the night clearly.

Ware builds her ensemble the way Rian Johnson does — by making every character’s relationship to every other character loaded with history, jealousy, or guilt. The glass house is a genius setting for books like Knives Out: you can see everything and understand nothing. The unreliable narrator energy runs strong here, but it’s the group dynamics that drive the plot. Every hen party attendee has a reason to resent the bride, and every conversation is a minefield. It’s the bridal party version of a Thrombey family reunion — except instead of an inheritance, they’re fighting over who gets to be the favorite friend.

8. Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson (2020)

A bookstore owner named Malcolm once wrote a blog post listing eight “perfect murders” from classic mystery fiction — Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, Donna Tartt. Harmless literary nerd content. Then an FBI agent shows up because someone is methodically recreating the murders from Malcolm’s list. Every kill mirrors a fictional one. The suspect pool includes anyone who read the post — which is basically everyone.

This is a whodunit about whodunits. Swanson writes a meta-mystery that’s part love letter to the genre, part locked-room puzzle, and part character study of a man whose obsession with mystery fiction might have created a real killer. The ensemble here is smaller than the other books on this list, more about the relationship between Malcolm, the FBI agent, and the literary references pulling the strings. But the “everyone’s a suspect” tension is constant.

For readers who love Knives Out because of its genre-awareness (Johnson’s camera practically winks at the Agatha Christie portraits on the wall), Eight Perfect Murders delivers that same self-referential energy in novel form. It’s also one of the sharpest mystery books with dark humor about what happens when someone takes your reading list too seriously.

9. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (2022)

Ernest Cunningham, a crime writer, goes to a family reunion at a snowy mountain lodge in the Australian Alps. On the first page, he tells you: everyone in my family has killed someone. Then he lays out the rules of fair-play mystery fiction and promises he’ll play by every one of them. Someone dies at the reunion. Ernest has to figure out which family member did it while also confronting the fact that his entire family tree is, statistically speaking, terrifying.

This is the closest book to Knives Out that exists. Dysfunctional family. Isolated location. Dark humor so sharp it could cut glass. A narrator who’s both detective and suspect. Every Cunningham has their own secret, their own justification, and their own body count, and Stevenson makes you care about all of them even as you’re calculating who’s the most likely murderer.

The meta-mystery structure (Ernest tells you directly that he’s following mystery rules) mirrors the way Knives Out plays with audience expectations: you know the formula, the book knows you know, and it still surprises you. I put this one last because it’s the best ensemble mystery novel for anyone who loved books like Knives Out and wants the exact same feeling between two covers. If you also loved the comedy-mystery energy of Only Murders in the Building, Stevenson hits that same gear but with higher stakes and a family you’d never want to spend Christmas with.

What to Read Next

If you loved the dark comedy and social satire baked into these whodunits — the class warfare, the sharp-tongued characters, the feeling that everyone in the room is performing a version of themselves — my novella Perfect Modern Wife plays in the same sandbox. Full disclosure: I wrote this one.

Audrey, a successful executive, visits a wellness retreat run by her estranged friend McKinley — who’s reinvented herself as one of the most famous tradwife influencers on the internet. When their mutual friend Jessica disappears during McKinley’s “Perfect Modern Wife” bootcamp, Audrey goes to the farm to find out what happened. Every woman at the retreat has an agenda. Nobody is what they seem. It’s the kind of trapped-ensemble, everyone’s-hiding-something story that fans of books like Knives Out will recognize — except the crime scene is a farmhouse and the weapon is wellness culture. Now optioned to become a movie.

FAQ: Books Like Knives Out

Is Knives Out Based on a Book?

No. Rian Johnson wrote the original screenplay for Knives Out (2019), and it’s not adapted from any novel. But the whodunit formula it uses is pure Agatha Christie: a wealthy family, a suspicious death, a detective interviewing suspects who all have motive. And Then There Were None (1939) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934) built the template that Knives Out modernized. Johnson has been open about Christie being his primary influence — he just added a hoodie and a donut-hole metaphor.

What Are the Best Whodunit Books With Dark Humor?

If dark humor is the priority, start with Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson — the family reunion whodunit is pitch-black funny from the first page. The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton blends its humor with puzzle-box complexity, and Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson delivers dry wit alongside genre-savvy suspense. For even more mystery books with dark humor, check out our list of funny mystery novels that go beyond cozy.

Are There Books Like Glass Onion Too?

Glass Onion used the same whodunit formula (ensemble cast, trapped setting, class satire) but moved it from a mansion to a private island. Several books on this list hit that exact vibe: The Hunting Party (isolated Scottish lodge), The Sanatorium (snowed-in Swiss Alps hotel), and And Then There Were None (the original island-murder template). If you’re specifically looking for books like Glass Onion with a tech-billionaire angle, the ensemble mystery novels on this list lean more toward inherited wealth and old-money secrets — but the trapped-with-terrible-people energy is identical. We also have a full list of island thriller books if the setting is what hooked you.

What Makes a Good Ensemble Mystery Novel?

Nathan Johnson, the composer who scored all three Knives Out films, put it perfectly: “The little secret with detective fiction [is] the detective is the lead but also not the main character.” The real draw is the ensemble — each character with their own secrets, voice, and goals, all colliding while trapped together. A good whodunit gives every suspect enough depth that you could imagine the story told from their perspective. That’s why ensemble mystery novels work best when the author invests in each character’s motive equally — not just who has the strongest alibi, but who has the most to lose.

What Should I Read After Knives Out If I Want More Whodunits?

For the closest match to the Knives Out experience, start with Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. Dysfunctional family, dark humor, a narrator who knows the rules. For the original template that started it all, read And Then There Were None. And if you want knives out book recommendations that push the formula into unexpected territory, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle reinvents the country-estate whodunit with a time-loop structure that Agatha Christie would have loved. For broader whodunit books with a comedic edge, our Books Like Only Murders in the Building list covers the comedy-mystery crossover.

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For readers who want more closed-setting suspense, our roundup of authors like Riley Sager covers eight writers who turn location into antagonist.