Here’s the good news: the newly revived fourth season of Veronica Mars—which follows the original 2004-07 television series and the 2014 film—was released (early!) on Hulu on Friday. The bad news? There’s only eight episodes, so if you’re a fan, you’ve probably already watched them all. What’s a girl to do? Crack a book, duh. The books on the list below don’t all hit all of the special V-Mars boxes—small-town California noir, private detective hijinks, a cynical heroine with a heart of gold, witty repartee for days—but they’ll each scratch that itch in one way or another.
Tana French, The Secret Place
If what you love about Veronica Mars is the fact that it exists in a world in which teenagers—particularly teenage girls—have outsize powers that border on the magical, and if you live for the lunch table drama and dope early aughts slang (“If you sit here, it proves that I’m the man-eating bitch who snatched you from one of the sweetest girls in school. I won’t have that. Now go.”), then The Secret Place is the book for you. Murder! Teenage girls! A cool female investigator! So many text messages. The tone is different, of course, but trust me, you’ll enjoy it.
Ross Macdonald, The Ross Macdonald Collection
Macdonald, one of the pillars of midcentury noir, has to be counted among the inspirations for Veronica Mars, in part because you really can’t have a long-running PI series without taking some inspiration from Macdonald’s Lew Archer series, but also because Neptune appears to be at the very least a sister city to Macdonald’s “Santa Teresa,” a fictional town outside Los Angeles where the class divisions were strong and the rich ran amok in seaside enclaves and walled country clubs. Macdonald was all about deeply buried family sins and psychological decay on America’s west coast, and just about any of his books (collected here) you might like to try, you’ll find plenty of affinities to the adventures of Mars Investigations.
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
This is probably the best book I’ve ever read about a girl who, along with her family (or at least all the members of her family who are left) gets ostracized from the town she lives in—and like Veronica, she develops her own personal brand of outsider chic. And manages to solve a mystery, to boot!
Sue Grafton, The Alphabet Mysteries series
Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone novels, which began in 1982 and concluded in 2017 with Y is for Yesterday, might well be the closest literary influence for Veronica Mars—an abundantly competent, no-nonsense former cop who apprenticed under the local PIs opens her own shop in Santa Teresa (a nod to Macdonald’s fictional California city), maintains a—let’s say hostile—relationship with local PD, and goes about solving all the cases the cops can’t, while also bucking city elders and taking up the cause of little guys across the city. The series carried on for decades, giving Kinsey a few chances for romances and relationships, always with a new case to solve but also some compelling over-arching mysteries and narratives that came to define this groundbreaking mystery stalwart.
Tara Isabella Burton, Social Creature
Honestly, Burton’s debut doesn’t have anything to do with Veronica Mars, except that it a) is about young women acting upon the world in major and sometimes catastrophic ways; b) has crimes; and c) is frankly delightful and will both amuse you and leave you thinking about its existential questions for months. So if you want a similar feeling without any of the same tropes or themes, here you go. (It just came out in paperback, for easy inclusion in any messenger bag you might or might not still own.)
Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss
If you wish Veronica were actually punk, and not just Neptune punk, you may just fall for Cass Neary, a skilled photographer in the 1970s New York music scene who bottoms out and, years later, finds herself investigating a murder.
Steph Cha, Follow Her Home
But maybe you just want more cool amateur PIs with a bone to pick with the world—and if that’s the case, I recommend this witty LA noir starring a Raymond Chandler-obsessed, too-nosy-for-her-own-good young woman who takes a case to help out a friend and winds up in way over her head. Sound familiar?
Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
Start here, and you’ll likely end up reading all of Gran’s Claire DeWitt books, which mix existential introspection, private eye noir, a complicated heroine, and a compelling setting (in this case, Post-Katrina New Orleans). And can’t you just imagine our Veronica saying this, eyebrows furrowed: “The client already knows the solution to his mystery. But he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t hire a detective to solve his mystery. He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can’t be solved.” All that’s missing is Backup.
Megan Abbott, The End of Everything
Several books by Megan Abbott would fit the bill—she has that irreverent noir thing down pat—but particularly The End of Everything, in which a teenage girl’s best friend disappears. The book becomes not only about what happened to the girl who went missing, but what happens for the girl who gets left behind.
Don Winslow, Dawn Patrol and The Gentlemen’s Hour
Before he made his name as the author of the epic narco-novels, Winslow himself was a private eye and made his early reputation with a pair of surf noirs featuring Boone Daniels, a San Diego PI who works the local cases during office hours but bends most of his life around the pursuit of his morning sessions on the waves. If you watch Veronica Mars in large part for the ambience of a seedy, divided seaside locale with a treasure trove of mysteries, start with Dawn Patrol and get a sampling of a very specific pocket of SoCal crime.
Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, The Thousand Dollar Tan Line and Mr. Kiss and Tell
If all else fails, you can read the actual Veronica Mars books, which came out after the 2014 film and which Rob Thomas describes as “98% canon.” And unlike many television-spinoff books, they’re actually supposed to be pretty good! Neptune completists, eat your hearts out.
