Truly Devious

Stevie Bell is a true-crime obsessive who has won a place at Ellingham Academy, a private school on a remote Vermont mountain for gifted thinkers, inventors and artists. The school was founded in the 1930s by the philanthropist Albert Ellingham, and in 1936 his wife and young daughter were kidnapped, a crime that was never solved. Albert received a mocking riddle signed "Truly, Devious", and the case went cold.

Stevie arrives with one plan: to solve it. She settles into Minerva House with a handful of housemates, among them an inventive engineer, a gloomy writer and a charming second-year, and begins digging through the school's history. Then a student dies, and the present-day mystery starts to look like the old one returning.

The story alternates between Stevie's investigation and the events of the 1930s, so the reader works on both puzzles at once. It is a young adult mystery with an amateur sleuth at its centre, a boarding-school setting, and riddles to untangle. It ends on a cliffhanger, because this is the first book of the Stevie Bell series and the case continues in The Vanishing Stair.