Truly Devious

About the Truly Devious series

Stevie Bell has one obsession: true crime, and specifically the unsolved 1936 kidnapping and murder case that has haunted Ellingham Academy, an eccentric Vermont boarding school for gifted teenagers, since its founding. When Stevie talks her way into an actual place at Ellingham, she gets more than she bargained for -- within her first term, a fellow student turns up dead in circumstances that echo the decades-old case eerily closely, and Stevie realizes the school's original murderer, known only by the taunting acrostic riddle they left behind, may never have actually stopped operating.

Maureen Johnson splits each book's mystery in two timelines, alternating between Stevie's present-day investigation and flashback chapters reconstructing the 1936 case detail by detail, letting readers piece together both puzzles alongside her. Truly Devious made a name for itself as one of the first YA mysteries to run its central case across multiple books rather than resolving cleanly by the end of book one -- Johnson deliberately withheld the 1936 solution until book three, a structural gamble that turned a devoted subset of readers into obsessive, spoiler-hunting theorists. Later entries send Stevie beyond Ellingham's grounds (a summer-camp cold case, a country-house death in England) while keeping her small found-family group of fellow students -- particularly her on-again boyfriend David -- central throughout.

The series combines the atmosphere of a classic boarding-school mystery with real research into forensics, true-crime podcasting culture, and the ethics of amateur investigation, filtered through Stevie's anxious, hyper-analytical narration.

How to read this series

Read in publication order -- this is not a series to dip into out of sequence. The central 1936 Ellingham case is deliberately spread across the first three books (Truly Devious, The Vanishing Stair, The Hand on the Wall) as one continuous mystery with a genuine cliffhanger at the end of book one, so those three are best read as a single unit rather than with gaps between them. The Box in the Woods and Nine Liars move Stevie on to new, self-contained cold cases once the original mystery is resolved, but keep building on her relationships and reputation from the earlier books, so newcomers should still start at book one rather than jumping in with book four or five. The Velvet Knife, out September 2026, continues Stevie's story after Nine Liars.