Books like “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

What to read after “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson · 1952
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Noir
- Psychological Thriller
Deputy sheriff Lou Ford seems like an ordinary small-town man, but his mild manner hides a violence he has carried since childhood. When old secrets and a woman from his past resurface, his two selves begin to pull him toward more killing.
2
Shutter Island
Dennis Lehane · 2003
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
In 1954 two US marshals travel to a hospital for the criminally insane on an island off Massachusetts to find a patient who has disappeared. As a storm cuts the island off, one of them begins to suspect the investigation is not what he was told.
3
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith · 1955
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Noir
- Psychological Thriller
Tom Ripley, a poor young man in New York, is sent to Italy by a rich shipbuilder to bring home his son Dickie. Instead Tom is drawn into Dickie's comfortable world and, when it is threatened, does whatever it takes to keep it.
4
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn · 2012
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears from a rented house and her husband Nick becomes the prime suspect. Two narrators tell very different versions of the same marriage.
5
Local Woman Missing
Mary Kubica · 2021
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Missing Person
In a quiet suburb, a young mother vanishes while out running, and weeks later another woman and her six-year-old daughter disappear nearby. Eleven years on, the daughter suddenly returns, and what she brings back unsettles everyone who stayed behind.
6
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Missing Person
Rachel rides the same commuter train every day and invents stories about a couple she sees from the window, until she learns the woman has vanished. Her memory of the night in question is full of gaps, and she cannot tell how much of what she believes is real.
7
In the Woods
Tana French · 2007
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Missing Person
When a girl is found dead in a wood outside Dublin, detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox take the case. For Rob the woods hold an old horror: as a child he was found there after two friends vanished, and he has never told anyone the full truth.
8
A Flicker in the Dark
Stacy Willingham · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Missing Person
As a child she helped put her father away for killing girls. Twenty years later she is a therapist about to marry, when young women in her town begin to disappear again and the old case follows her into the present.
9
The Woman in the Window
A. J. Finn · 2018
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
Child psychologist Anna Fox lives alone, unable to leave her home, and spends her days watching her neighbours through a camera. When she sees something in the house across the street, no one believes her, and she is left to work out whether the danger is real or in her mind.
10
The Couple Next Door
Shari Lapena · 2016
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Missing Person
A couple leave their sleeping baby at home while they attend a dinner party next door, checking on her every half hour. They return to an empty crib. The police suspect the parents, and both of them start learning what the other has been hiding.
11
Then She Was Gone
Lisa Jewell · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Missing Person
Ten years after her teenage daughter disappeared, a mother learns what happened and tries to rebuild her life. Meeting a new partner and his young daughter, she is unsettled by small resemblances to her lost child, which reopen the case.
12
A Simple Plan
Scott Smith · 1993
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
- Psychological Thriller
- Morally Grey Character
Three men find a crashed plane, a dead pilot and a bag of money in the snow. What starts as a quiet decision to keep the cash spirals into suspicion, lies and violence, as each tries to hold together a plan that keeps changing.