7 Books Like The Good Daughter for Readers Who Came for the Quinn Sisters

The question I’d use to pick your next book after Karin Slaughter’s The Good Daughter is this. What did you want more of when Charlotte and Samantha Quinn were on the page together? Two sisters who remember the same night differently? The awkwardness of asking for help from someone who knows exactly how to hurt you? A family that has spent decades finding ways to talk around one awful thing?

Twenty-eight years after the attack that killed their mother, fresh violence in Pikeville forces the Quinn family to reckon with the past. For me, the most compelling part of that setup is what happens when Charlie and Sam have to make room for each other’s version of it. If that’s what kept you turning pages, start with Pretty Girls for Slaughter’s closest match or Long Bright River for an equally complicated sisterhood in a very different setting.

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1. Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Best for estranged sisters forced to work together.

Claire and Lydia have spent years apart since their teenage sister Julia vanished. Then Claire’s husband is murdered, and the two surviving sisters start looking for a connection between his death and Julia’s disappearance. That means relying on someone each has spent years learning to live without.

This is where I’d send a Quinn sisters fan first. Slaughter gives Claire and Lydia a reason to cooperate before she gives them any reason to trust each other. The investigation makes their old resentments harder to put aside, especially when what they learn about Julia forces them to reconsider how their family came apart. This is the most graphic pick here, with explicit sexual violence.

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2. Long Bright River by Liz Moore

Best for a sister whose job makes it harder to help.

Mickey is a police officer in Philadelphia. Her sister Kacey lives with addiction in the same neighborhood Mickey patrols. The two are estranged, but when Kacey disappears around the time a string of murders hits Mickey’s district, Mickey starts searching for her.

If you liked the way Charlie’s work as a lawyer makes the Quinn family’s problems harder to keep private, Mickey’s position raises a similar question. How much can her job actually tell her about what her sister needs? The flashbacks to their childhood give Kacey a history beyond the disappearance and show how two girls who grew up side by side came to understand safety differently. I’d pick this one for the sisterhood even if you usually read crime novels for the solution.

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3. The Better Sister by Alafair Burke

Best for a murder case that puts the family’s loyalties on display.

When Manhattan lawyer Adam is murdered, his widow, Chloe Taylor, has to deal with his ex-wife, Nicky. Nicky is also Chloe’s older sister. Their history gets even harder to sidestep when Adam and Nicky’s teenage son, whom Chloe helped raise, comes under suspicion.

Of these seven, this is the one I’d hand to readers who liked watching the Quinns navigate what a criminal case makes public. Chloe and Nicky each have a different claim to being the person who knows their family best. The murder investigation gives both of them reasons to question what they thought they understood about Adam and about each other.

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4. The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth

Best for two accounts of a childhood that are hard to reconcile.

Fern Castle works in a library and has dinner with her twin, Rose, three times a week. When Rose has trouble getting pregnant, Fern decides she could carry a baby for her. She sees it as a way to repay Rose for years of looking after her. The more you learn about their childhood, the more weight that word repay starts to carry.

Pick this if your favorite Quinn scenes were the ones that made you reconsider who was protecting whom. Fern’s account and Rose’s journal give you two ways into the family history. I’d pay attention to the ordinary things each sister believes she owes the other. That’s where Hepworth makes their closeness feel unsettling.

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5. The Wrong Sister by Claire Douglas

Best for another attack that leaves two sisters asking why.

Tasha’s older sister, Alice, offers to look after her children while Tasha and her husband get away. While staying at Tasha’s house, Alice and her husband are attacked. Alice survives, her husband is killed, and a message to Tasha suggests she was the intended target.

This is the pick I’d give someone who wants to be pulled into the mystery quickly. As with the attack in The Good Daughter, the violence raises immediate questions about why it happened to this family. Douglas adds a particularly uncomfortable possibility. The sisters’ resemblance and Alice’s decision to help may have put her directly in the path of something meant for Tasha.

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6. The Sisters of Glass Ferry by Kim Michele Richardson

Best for a small town that has lived with a disappearance for decades.

In rural Kentucky, Patsy Butler and her date disappear on prom night in 1952. On the twins’ birthday each year, their mother bakes a strawberry cake in the hope that Patsy will come home. Roughly two decades pass before the river gives Flannery, Patsy’s twin, a clue about what happened.

This Southern historical mystery takes its time. That annual birthday cake is the detail that makes me put it on this list. Flannery has to keep celebrating a day she once shared with Patsy while the family holds open a place for her return. If Pikeville interested you because the Quinns had to live among people who knew pieces of their story, Glass Ferry is the town I’d visit next.

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7. The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon

Best for a sister left wondering what she would have heard if she’d picked up.

Jax ignores a string of calls from her estranged older sister, Lexie. The next day, Lexie is found drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax returns, she discovers that Lexie had been digging into the family’s history and the property’s past.

This is the list’s supernatural pick. McMahon gives the family’s history a physical place to gather, and the pool becomes harder to explain the longer Jax stays. What makes it fit the Quinn sisters list is the missed calls. Before Jax has an old mystery to solve, she has a painfully ordinary decision to live with.

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Which book should you read first?

Choose Pretty Girls if you want Slaughter’s intensity and another uneasy reunion. Pick Long Bright River if you want an investigation shaped by one sister’s worry for the other. I’d go with The Good Sister if the part you most want to revisit is the feeling that two people could share a childhood and come away with very different ideas of what happened.

Still deciding where to start with Karin Slaughter? See our guide to reading The Good Daughter as a standalone. If you’re revisiting Charlie and Sam through the adaptation, read our book-versus-show comparison.

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