The Cheerleaders Books in Order

The Cheerleaders books are linked YA thrillers rather than a long, continuous series. Both novels are set in Sunnybrook, a small upstate New York town where school sports, local gossip, and old grief shape almost everything. If you want the clearest path in, start with The Cheerleaders and then move to The Champions, because the second book builds on the town history established in the first.

In The Cheerleaders, the central question hangs over five deaths that the town has tried very hard to file away. Monica's sister was the last of the Sunnybrook cheerleaders to die, and years later Monica is still living with the fallout. When new clues start surfacing, including letters hidden in her stepdad's desk and an old cell phone that should not matter anymore, Monica is pulled back into a case everyone around her would rather leave buried. The book works as both a murder mystery and a story about grief, memory, and how families keep damaging secrets.

Sunnybrook is the real constant.

Thomas uses the town almost like a pressure cooker. Reputation matters. So does who gets protected, who gets blamed, and which tragedies the community is willing to turn into a memorial instead of an investigation. The mood is dark and tense, but grounded, more about manipulation, fear, and social power than anything supernatural.

Expect teenage friendships, strained parents, and the uneasy feeling that every hallway conversation matters more than it should. Thomas writes school culture as something petty, intimate, and dangerous all at once, which gives both books their edge.

The second novel, The Champions, jumps ahead eleven years, when Hadley moves to Sunnybrook and finds a town trying to sell a cleaner story about itself. The cheerleader deaths are old history now, while the championship football team gives everyone something brighter to rally around. Then Hadley, working on the school newspaper, gets assigned to cover the Tigers just as one player is poisoned at a party. Strange warnings arrive, another player dies, and the past starts bleeding into the present in a way that makes it clear Sunnybrook never fixed what was broken.

The heroes change, but the pattern doesn't.

That is what links these books. Monica and Hadley are different kinds of outsiders, one trapped inside the town's grief, the other new enough to see what longtime residents ignore. Across both novels, the stakes come from teenagers trying to uncover the truth in places where adults have already decided which version of events is easiest to live with. If you like small-town mysteries, layered clues, and stories about what communities do to protect themselves, this pair should land well.