Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
My Rating: ★
Stevie Bell is the new girl at Ellingham Academy, a prestigious private boarding school. Obsessed with true crime, she’s interested in the mysterious dark history of her school and wants to be the one to solve the mysterious unsolved cold case that haunts it. Unfortunately for her, she finds a different murder mystery on her hands, fulfilling one of her wishes in a way she did not expect.
I picked up this book after a friend told me she was reading it and wanted me to check it out and tell her what I thought of it. Unfortunately, it turns out I’m not a fan. I disliked nearly every character, including the protagonist. Of the three characters I did like, one immediately dies and the other two are hardly there. I think the book has everything there for me to like it, but it’s sadly a miss for me.
I think I would’ve liked the book better if it didn’t take place in two eras. Majority of the book follows Stevie in the present, but I found that I liked the chapters that take place in the 1930s the best. The characters during these chapters are interesting and there is an actual mystery taking place. The rest of the time, we follow Stevie and her classmates who are all trying a little too hard to be cool, mysterious, and artsy. They come off as one-dimensional versions of stereotypes out of a movie.
As far as the mystery goes, we have a double mystery here. The first is what happened to the school founder and his family, and the second is a lackluster murder mystery that starts a little over halfway through the book. I would have liked it better if it stuck to one mystery that continues throughout the series over having two in this book. It would have also been fun to see Stevie trying to investigate the abduction and murders on a much greater level, especially if she attended the school within 15 years of the events and not several decades later. I just think that too much time has passed to make her determination to solve the cold case and the school’s strange interest in encouraging her investigation make sense.
Weirdly enough, the most interesting thing that happened in the entire book occurs at the end of the final chapter. While I’m tempted to pick up the second book just to see where this revelation takes us, the bland characters and slow-moving plot are not enough to get me to continue the series. I’m sad to say that this is a miss for me.
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