The Young Adult Murder Mystery Series That Got Me Truly Addicted

My thoughts while reading Maureen Johnson’s “Truly Devious” series.

I picked up Truly Devious expecting a fun whodunnit. 

When the first book ended and there was no resolution to the mystery, I knew I was in for a longer ride.

What I got was a twisty, layered mystery set in an elite boarding school with secret tunnels, cryptic clues, and a heroine who’s as obsessed with true crime as I am. 

This YA trilogy by Maureen Johnson had me hooked from page one — and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. 

This post is dedicated to the Truly Devious series, and all the fun adventure Maureen Johnson brought into my life with her writing.

The first book was a total page-turner

I’m a fan of high-school dramas, but this one took a while to get into. 

The teenage protagonists — Stevie, David, Nate, and the rest come across as robotic. I found it jarring how they coldly stated facts in the beginning. But as the story progressed and we got a glimpse into what drives these characters, I started warming up to them.

This protagonist, Stevie Bell, enrols in Ellingham Academy because she’s drawn to the 80-year-old unsolved mystery. Albert Ellingham, the founder of the school finds his world shaken one foggy night when his wife and daughter go missing. The wife’s dead body washed up in the lake a few days later. But the infant daughter was never found. This tragedy broke Albert’s heart, leading to his untimely and mysterious death a year later.

The day Albert’s wife and daughter went missing, a riddle arrived in a letter from an anonymous stranger calling themselves “Truly Devious.” 

And when Albert died, he left back another riddle that no one was able to solve.

“How do you look for someone who’s never really there?
Always on the staircase, but never on the stair.”

And then, there’s another mystery in the present, as one of Stevie’s classmates is found murdered in an underground cave.

The night before the murder, another mysterious riddle appears on Stevie’s wall. A riddle about murderers and detectives. A riddle signed “Truly Devious.”

These two mysteries tangle in Stevie’s head, making her (and the reader) constantly travel between the past and the present. 

The one thing common between both these crimes 80 years apart— anonymous letters written in riddles.

The book dives deep into the character’s psyches, and the author doesn’t sugarcoat anything. The dark setting of an old school set atop a mountain, and the eerie atmosphere created using elements like rain, fog, hail, etc. draw the reader in.

I felt like I was inside Ellingham Academy, walking across the grass fields and glass-ceilinged halls of the old building. 

I was right there at the ball room, listening to Albert Ellingham making one last desperate attempt to save his wife and daughter. 

I danced with Nate and Stevie in the silent parties, and watched the scary statues lining the garden path upto the school entrance.

I was enthralled. This was a book I couldn’t put down.

The ending didn’t really solve anything, but gave us readers more mysteries to ponder over.

I’m lucky I read this book after all parts of the trilogy were published. I can’t imagine the agony of waiting for the sequel after that cliffhanger ending.

Onto the next…