Truly Devious

Truly Devious

By Maureen Johnson

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”

Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.

True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder.

Holy Shit! What the fuck did I just read?!  Take a secluded high school campus, a bunch of high-strung "genius" kids, a cold case 1930s Lindbergh-adjacent murder/kidnapping mystery, an actual dead teenager, the most dangerous game of Never Have I Ever ever, and end it on a bunch of frigging cliffhangers, and you'll get Truly Devious. 

You know what, I knew this was a bad idea.  This series is clearly identified as a trilogy, and only two of them have been published so far.  But the prompt!  And it sounded really cool!  So I stepped off into the pool and now here I am, hung out to dry, waiting on the next one to come out WHO KNOWS WHEN.  God, I hate WIPs.  This is going to be awful.

Suffice it to say, this got me out of the serious-book blues. And perhaps not surprisingly, I've already read the second book too, so we can talk about both in this review.  As you can tell, I did very much enjoy the book.  It can be confusing, and be aware that unlike many trilogies, this one is actually more like a single book than a series - things are mentioned and dropped, to be picked up (hopefully) in later books.  Questions are asked in Truly Devious that don't get answered until The Vanishing Stair, and others are left for the third. 

The lead character, Stevie, is not always very sympathetic, and there were a few times I was surprised by her actions (particularly romantically) which is a little odd, considering it's being narrated by her.  I also think the first book is stronger than the second (which is parodied in The Vanishing Stair, as Nate, the resident blocked author bemoans having to write a sequel - can't you just do a set-up and a denouement?) but given how closely intertwined and plotted out everything seems to be, I have faith that the author isn't artificially bloating the story or going to wind up writing the mystery into a corner.  It helps that people keep DYING, honestly, if we weren't following Stevie around I would probably have arrested her by now. It's not a good look to discover three bodies in a matter of a few weeks.  Especially since it's also her first semester at boarding school.  You gotta pace yourself, man.

I was also recently re-reading Murder on the Orient Express, which is also loosely inspired by the Lindbergh kidnapping, and it's interesting to see how each author has taken the story and molded it into very different murder mysteries.  Christie set up a classic revenge novel with the people whose family and friends were affected, and by the end, it's a visceral, cathartic feeling to know they'll get away with it.  In Truly Devious [And SPOILERS for The Vanishing Stair], the actual intended victims, Alice and Iris, are barely fleshed out, and our sympathies ride on Dottie, the clever, poor girl, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The mystery is a puzzle, not a tragedy.  Although we do get some of Ellingham's sorrow afterwards, the way Truly Devious sets it up, it honestly sounded like he faked his own death, again alleviating some of the tragic consequences.  Now The Vanishing Stair seems to counter that, having him die in a confrontation with the kidnapper, but the whole picture probably won't come out until the third. 

It does feel a little cheap that after teasing the tin box in Truly Devious, we find out that Frankie and Edward are only very distantly involved in the kidnapping and then only by coincidence - they happened to write a threatening letter, as a prank, and Frankie's comments seemed to trigger the whole plan (accidentally), and it's also unclear to me how Stevie determines that they had nothing to do with the kidnapping, since I don't think the mere fact of their being students would eliminate them.  They could just as easily have hired minions to do the dirty work as the actual kidnapper did.

I can definitely see how it would get tiring to read three books all hashing out the same mystery from different perspectives, but Johnson does a pretty good job not just of giving new clues and insight, but also of creating large new mysteries to focus on, while leaving Ellingham in the background.  It's kind of the same problem that Veronica Mars, another excellent teen detective story, had, especially in the second season, and I don't think there's really a good around it, while still keeping the flow right.  In the third season of Veronica Mars, they went to several mini-arc mysteries instead, and that's not really doable here.

Overall, I am certainly intrigued and ready for the third book.  We still have to find out who projected the message on Stevie's wall (and what it means), where Alice is, or was, what actually happened that night, who killed Fenton, why Johnson seems to be trying to make Jenny Quinn a person of interest, whatever happened to Hayes and Ellie the night he died, how Ellie knew about the tunnels but couldn't get out again, and whoever is assisting Johnson on her legal references, because this whole nonsense about a secret codicil is in fact that: nonsense.  You can't prove up a will and leave out the codicil.  It's a public document.  Everything gets filed.  Now, it's possible that he wrote a trust and the "codicil" is actually a trust amendment, but in that case, everyone is calling it the wrong thing.  It was definitely possible for someone in that time period to do a trust, so I don't know why not just say it's a trust instead, and leave me some peace of mind, but all it does is bother the heck out of me.  Maybe book three will involve a discussion of why Vermont law in 1938 didn't require the filing of the will and codicil, which would be both hilariously specific to my interests as well as genuinely appreciated by this estates and trusts attorney. 



30: A Book Featuring An Amateur Detective