What Is The Best Book Series For Adults 2020 With Gripping Plots?

I read a lot of so-called 'literary fiction' but found a series that genuinely absorbed me this decade: Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi'. I know it’s often treated as a standalone, but the depth and the slow-reveal world-building have a completeness that feels serial. The themes of memory, solitude, and what constitutes reality are handled with a maturity that doesn't need shock value. It’s quiet, but it sticks with you. For something with a more traditional series structure, but equally adult, I’d point to 'The Scholomance' trilogy by Naomi Novik, which started with 'A Deadly Education'. It subverts the magical school trope with a ruthless, survival-horror logic. The protagonist’s voice is brilliantly cynical, and the ethical dilemmas around power and sacrifice are complex. It’s fantasy, but it reads like a thesis on systemic failure and the cost of safety.

Honestly, a series I keep seeing mentioned is 'The Scholomance' by Naomi Novik, starting with 'A Deadly Education'. It got a ton of acclaim, including from places like NPR. The praise mostly centers on how it takes a magical school premise and twists it into something genuinely dark, systemic, and politically sharp, which felt so refreshing. It’s not just a ‘dark Harry Potter’ comparison—Novik built a brutal, almost survival-horror logic into the magic that comments on privilege and scarcity in a way that really stuck with me. Some critics found the protagonist’s internal voice overly dense at first, but I warmed to it. The way the trilogy builds its world and resolves the larger conflict across the three books is incredibly clever and emotionally hefty. It’s one of those fantasy series that’s both a page-turner and leaves you thinking about its structures long after.

Been on a bit of a series kick lately and I keep coming back to how well Tamsyn Muir handled Gideon and Harrow in 'The Locked Tomb' books. The first one, 'Gideon the Ninth', really pulls you in with this swaggering, hilarious exterior, but by 'Harrow the Ninth' the whole narrative structure bends to mirror a fractured psyche in a way I’ve rarely seen. It’s less about gradual change and more about brutal, necessary self-destruction and rebuilding from absolute zero. The characters don’t just develop; they are completely unmade and remade across the series. Some folks bounce off the second book’s style, which is fair, but if you stick with it, the payoff in understanding what Harrow did to herself is devastating. It’s a masterclass in using genre—necromancy in space, of all things—to explore grief, identity, and devotion. I found myself thinking about the nature of sacrifice and memory for days after finishing.

detective series that actually surprise me have become increasingly rare. Too many rely on the same worn-out patterns—the grieving partner did it, the therapist is the secret mastermind, the obvious red herring is actually innocent but their identical twin isn't. I need a series that plays fair but still knocks me sideways. For pure, intricate plot machinery, it's hard to top Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad books. They're less about 'whodunit' in a traditional sense and more about the psychological excavation that happens after the twist. In 'The Likeness', the premise itself is the twist: a detective goes undercover as a murder victim who was her near-doppelgänger. The real mind-bender isn't the final reveal, but the unsettling unraveling of identity and the group dynamics in the victim's eccentric academic house. The twists feel earned because they're rooted in character fractures you didn't realize were so deep. On a completely different end of the spectrum, I recently tore through Anthony Horowitz's Hawthorne and Horowitz series, starting with 'The Word is Murder'. The meta-fictional hook—Horowitz writes himself as the bumbling sidekick to a brilliant, abrasive ex-detective—could be gimmicky, but it works. The twists often involve the mechanics of storytelling itself, like a revelation hidden in the chapter structure or a clue embedded in the author's own described actions. It's clever in a very satisfying, puzzle-box way that respects the reader's intelligence without being smug. A more divisive pick would be Stuart Turton's 'The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle'. It's a standalone, but its core mechanic of a repeating day and body-hopping protagonist creates a cascade of twists so dense it demands a flowchart. The pleasure is less in emotional payoff and more in the sheer audacity of the plotting architecture. It's a book that makes you re-evaluate everything you read three chapters prior, repeatedly.