Parents' Guide to Truly Devious, Book 1

Like the author's Shades of London series, this trilogy start takes place in a hip boarding school that readers immediately will want to attend, even if there's a murderer in their midst. It's that cool. There's a study yurt, snowshoes issued to everyone -- it's Vermont -- a mansion, secret tunnels everywhere, and the students have fascinating fields of study. There's an opera singer, a visual artist, a video game maker, a novelist, an inventor, and an actor/YouTube star, for starters. And there's Stevie, who studies crime and wants to study everything about Ellingham Academy, where murders took place in the 1930s. The story jumps back and forth between 1936 and the present, cleverly piecing together brief stories and detective interviews from the past until a death of a student in the present pulls the reader into two complex cases at once. It also pulls the intellectually focused Stevie into an uncomfortable realization: She said she always wanted to see a dead body, and now she's facing the reality of it, with the shock and loss that goes with it. Her growth as a character adds depth to the story.

Readers will devour this mystery quickly and may be disappointed that so many loose ends remain. There's setup here that seems meant for other books in the series -- lots of time pawing through Albert Ellingham's desk tchotchkes and pondering the last riddle he wrote, for example -- making Truly Devious not stand alone as well as it could. But it does promise intriguing books to come.