Competitions make for irresistible crime fiction—high-stakes sports, political campaigns, competitive art programs. These are ecosystems built for suspense, filled with power imbalances and characters who share complicated histories, toxic codependencies, old grudges, and bruised egos. And most importantly, they are filled with people who want something. Badly. Because people who want something badly enough will sometimes do dangerous things to get it.
That’s exactly what drew me to the world of Pretty Dead Things. I was fascinated by the setting of a Texas beauty pageant, a competitive world where women are expected to perform femininity and one is crowned queen.
I imagined a group of women—contestants and their mothers—who have all grown up in the same small town, who carry old wounds and buried secrets into the competition alongside their rhinestone heels. These women have watched each other succeed and fail for decades. And now they’re back under one roof, pitted against each other, all wanting the same thing.
How badly did they want it? And what would they be willing to do to get it?
It’s a story with a body count. But at its core, it’s a story about women whose ambitions collide, and what happens when there’s only one crown.
In a genre where the propulsion so often comes from the victimization of women—the missing girls, the dead wives, the kidnapped mothers and daughters and sisters—there is something oddly powerful about a story propelled forward simply by a woman wanting.
Here are five suspense novels driven by women and girls who want something badly enough to turn a competition into a crime novel.
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Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me
The Knox family has organized their entire lives around one thing: their daughter’s potential to become an Olympic gymnast. Told from the perspective of the mother, Katie Knox, Abbott subverts expectations from the start. Because Katie isn’t the kind of mother we’ve come to expect in stories like this. She isn’t overbearing, doesn’t live vicariously through her daughter. She simply loves her. Or so she thinks.
But when a mysterious hit-and-run rocks the gymnastics community, threatening to unearth secrets and derail everything the family has worked so hard for, Katie discovers exactly what she is willing to do to protect her daughter’s dreams. Abbott is the reigning queen of this territory, and You Will Know Me is one of her best.
Layne Fargo, The Favorites
Wuthering Heights set in the competitive world of ice dancing, and Fargo stays true to Brontë’s characters in the best possible way. Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha maintain all of their predecessors’ passion, yearning, and toxicity, transplanted into a setting and a plot that Fargo makes entirely her own.
This Kat is driven not by a desire for social standing but by the hunger for a gold medal. And the journey to get what she wants involves heartbreaking sacrifice and genuine peril, especially when someone else wants it just as badly. Romantic, ruthless, and propulsive.
Kara Thomas, The Cheerleaders
The Cheerleaders is YA at its finest, built around one of the most arresting premises in recent crime fiction: “There are no more cheerleaders in the town of Sunnybrook.” Five girls died in separate horrific incidents, leading the town to dismantle the team altogether. Five years later, Monica, the younger sister of the last girl to die starts putting together the pieces and discovers that the deaths may be far more connected than anyone suspected.
Thomas explores female friendship, competition, and the specific cruelty of small-town social hierarchies with a sharp and unflinching eye.
Mona Awad, Bunny
The wildcard on this list, and the most deliciously strange. Bunny is set in a competitive MFA creative writing program, a closed, cultlike ecosystem where belonging is the prize and ambition takes on a surreal and supernatural quality. The desire to stand apart, the desire to belong, and the desire to be chosen all curdle into something haunting and genuinely horrifying.
Awad understands the particular madness of wanting to be an artist, and what that wanting can do to a person. Read it with the lights on.
Hannah Selinger, Valley of the Moms
Valley of the Moms zeroes in on one of the most vicious and underestimated competitive arenas of all: the suburban Parent Teacher Organization. When Anna Plummer discovers that her daughter’s public school gives preference to wealthy families, she decides to run for PTO president, going up against the woman currently holding that title, who has no intention of giving it up.
What starts as a neighborhood squabble soon uncovers something much more sinister holding the town together. A chilling exploration of the structures of wealth and power, and the danger of questioning those in control.
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