Hardcover, 445 pages
English language
Published Dec. 27, 2022 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Senior year at Ellingham Academy for Stevie Bell isn’t going well. Her boyfriend, David, is studying in London. Her friends are obsessed with college applications. With the cold case of the century solved, Stevie is adrift. There is nothing to distract her from the questions pinging around her brain—questions about college, love, and life in general.
Relief comes when David invites Stevie and her friends to join him for study abroad, and his new friend Izzy introduces her to a double-murder cold case. In 1995, nine friends from Cambridge University went to a country house and played a drunken game of hide-and-seek. Two were found in the woodshed the next day, murdered with an ax.
The case was assumed to be a burglary gone wrong, but one of the remaining seven saw something she can’t explain. This was no break-in. Someone’s lying about what happened in the woodshed.
…Senior year at Ellingham Academy for Stevie Bell isn’t going well. Her boyfriend, David, is studying in London. Her friends are obsessed with college applications. With the cold case of the century solved, Stevie is adrift. There is nothing to distract her from the questions pinging around her brain—questions about college, love, and life in general.
Relief comes when David invites Stevie and her friends to join him for study abroad, and his new friend Izzy introduces her to a double-murder cold case. In 1995, nine friends from Cambridge University went to a country house and played a drunken game of hide-and-seek. Two were found in the woodshed the next day, murdered with an ax.
The case was assumed to be a burglary gone wrong, but one of the remaining seven saw something she can’t explain. This was no break-in. Someone’s lying about what happened in the woodshed.
Seven suspects. Two murders. One killer still playing a deadly game.
I guess Maureen Johnson wanted to do an Agatha Christie style country house mystery and came up with a very tenuous reason for Stevie to be involved. Half of this book is just the gang going round doing London tourist stuff and the mystery is wholly separate to that. Definitely needs some suspension of disbelief to enjoy it.
Stevie Bell is back and in top form as a trip to England leads her to solving an axe murder from the 1990s. Maureen Johnson does a fabulous job balancing mystery elements with YA ones; the murder mystery is at the center of the story, but at the same time, the teen characters are grappling with the realities of senior year and deciding where to go next, while Stevie navigates her changing romantic relationships with David. David remains my least favorite character, but it's more than made up for by the rest of the cast, which includes Stevie, her delightful group of friends, and a host of new characters introduced in this book. Nate gets a particularly lovely moment in this one. The depictions of living with anxiety are as spot-on as they were in previous installments. The Nine, the group of friends at the center of the mystery, sparkle …
Stevie Bell is back and in top form as a trip to England leads her to solving an axe murder from the 1990s. Maureen Johnson does a fabulous job balancing mystery elements with YA ones; the murder mystery is at the center of the story, but at the same time, the teen characters are grappling with the realities of senior year and deciding where to go next, while Stevie navigates her changing romantic relationships with David. David remains my least favorite character, but it's more than made up for by the rest of the cast, which includes Stevie, her delightful group of friends, and a host of new characters introduced in this book. Nate gets a particularly lovely moment in this one. The depictions of living with anxiety are as spot-on as they were in previous installments. The Nine, the group of friends at the center of the mystery, sparkle with personality both as individuals and somehow even more so as a group. This is clearly a book written by someone with deep personal connections to England, long-distance relationships, and theatre because the verisimilitude with those aspects is off the charts. All in all, a highly satisfying entry in a personal favorite series.
