Stevie Bell 5

Ah, here we go again. Stevie's on another mystery. 

I think this was the weakest of the lot so far. David is at school in London and misses Stevie, so he arranges for her, Nate, Janelle and Vi to come stay for a week. Because it includes missing a few days of school before Thanksgiving break, headmistress Jenny Quinn, a notorious hardass, is really strict on their requirements. They have to give reports and answer the phone whenever she calls, etc. It seems a tad strict. 

Stevie inner turmoil this time is torn between a) wanting to have sex with David for the first time and b) the fact that she has no idea what to do for college. 

Everyone is making a huge deal about college. Dude. Take a year off. It's not the end of the world. If you don't want the stress of applying for school while you're still IN school, then don't put yourself through it. You do not need to rush into college right out of high school. The fact that literally no one said this is ridiculous. And poor Nate is so directionless that he blew all his money applying to over 70 schools and has no idea what he wants. Janelle has some sort of big plan and she's kind of an ass about it. Vi is just going along with everything. 

So while they're touring around London, David introduces his friend Izzy (and Stevie is pretty jealous), who in turn introduces them to the inevitable cold case. 

The mystery this time is set in 1995. I graduated high school in 1996, so I can visualize some of these looks perfectly and I can definitely hear the music. My friend in undergrad was obsessed with Britpop. I know these bands. It's a group of nine BFFs that are a comedy troupe. They've just graduated university and are having one last hurrah at the manor of one of the group. He's going to be a viscount. Yep. England. So while they're there, they have a giant game of hide and seek in the pouring rain at night while drunk. Two of them turn up dead and that's the mystery. 

This one had me guessing. It was obvious it was one of the group, but I couldn't figure out who because the motive isn't clear until Stevie's doing the big reveal and the flashback reveal chapter happens. Looking back, I see the pieces, but yeah, I wasn't sure who it was. 

Stevie was mostly good in this one. I think she's still growing. Yeah, she was jealous, but she's human and her boyfriend is in another country. And he DOES focus a lot on Izzy and not enough on Stevie. Then the fucking asshole breaks up with her less than an hour before they have to leave for the airport. I was so pissed. Turns out he is intimidated by her and feels directionless in life because he doesn't have a thing that he wants to do like the others, so he was stupid. Then he gets drunk and Izzy is bringing Stevie to him as a surprise and they see him kissing someone else. End of book. UGH. 

The one thing Stevie did that I didn't like was claim she needed all her friends to go with her to the manor to meet all the remaining members of the Nine. She lied about what the headmistress said, which I could forgive, but she showed zero respect for the things the others actually wanted to do in London. She does not NEED them to solve crimes. She does the majority of things on her own. She did not have to ruin Vi's meeting with a curator to drag everyone along. She just got clingy because she's afraid of everyone going their separate ways, but it was disrespectful. 

Janelle was honestly mostly annoying here. Way too into the college thing and it's not a pretty obsession. She got over Stevie lying too quickly, too. 

Vi barely did anything. I definitely would have kept my meeting with a curator. Come on. Stand up for yourself. 

Nate also sadly barely did anything. He's a bit of a side mystery because he's always writing, but that turns out to be his obsessive college applying. He also does a big reveal to Stevie that he's Ace, but if anyone couldn't see that a mile away, they probably shouldn't be reading mysteries. 

So yeah, definitely not the cast at their best. Not the best mystery. It was fun, but I enjoyed the others more.

The Cloisters

Okay, so the premise is that a scholar of the early Renaissance has graduated from a small university in WA. She didn't get into any grad programs but was accepted for the summer program at the Met in NYC. So, still recovering from the death of her father, she goes off to the city to start her life anew and gets tangled up in this intense drama at the Cloisters. 

Let me sum that up a bit: this novel is set at the Cloisters, a place I've visited and enjoyed, and the characters are mostly museum professionals. 

Sounds like something I'd love, right?

Then you can imagine just how badly these characters were written for me to have profoundly disliked this mess. 

I'll whip through a summary here. Ann, the PoV, gets to the Met and learns the guy she was going to be working under has had to go off to Italy, so there is no position for her anymore. Coincidentally, a guy comes into the office of the woman talking to Ann and needs a new person to help out at the Cloisters. He offers the spot to Ann and off they go. Ann also meets the older girl she'll be working with, who is a rich, gorgeous, highly intelligent blonde named Rachel. Ann and Rachel will be doing research for Patrick, the guy who offered Ann a spot. He's the curator of the Cloisters and working on an exhibit based on divination. He's obsessed with the tarot. 

Ann soon falls in with their little crowd. Rachel and Patrick are a not-so-secret couple. Leo, the gardener, is quickly interested in Ann and they become a thing. 

Then Ann discovers a set of tarot cards bought by Patrick actually is much older than they seem. They have false fronts revealing an original design behind, and Ann has a paper that links them to a famous Renaissance family, proving tarot was used for divination a lot earlier than scholars thought. She shares this with Rachel and they sneakily leave Patrick out and work on an article about the cards themselves. 

Patrick turns up dead. Leo is arrested. Ann begins to have other suspicions and digs into Rachel's past, then realizes she's the actual killer. Rachel set up Leo but the evidence is too circumstantial to charge him with murder. Ann also realizes Rachel killed her parents and sets Rachel up to die the same way. Ann publishes the article on her own and gets a full-time assistant curator position. 

So let's look at the horrible cast. 

Ann is definitely suffering some grief from her father's death. He was a natural linguist, but worked as a janitor in the university she ended up attending, picking up scraps of papers in different languages in the trash of the buildings he cleaned and teaching himself and Ann new languages that way. She has a definite passion for her field, but her specific area is very limited, which is why she wasn't accepted at any schools. She's caught up in the NYC museum world and tries hard to keep up with Rachel. She and Leo have a decent thing, but Rachel gets in the way of that and Ann ends up choosing Rachel and their work over Leo. After Patrick's death, Ann learns that Leo has been stealing from the Cloisters and she's pretty upset about it, but she's the only one. I wasn't a big fan of how she stole one of the tarot cards from Patrick, made her discovery, and then kept it to herself to further her own career. She was always a boring character, but that made her really unlikeable. I liked her a little more as the story went on. She made sure Leo was held accountable for the thefts. She confronted Rachel about her murderous habits and she put Rachel in the same situation Rachel put herself and her parents in, leaving her life in the hands of fate. The biggest surprise for me in this book wasn't that Rachel was the killer, but that Ann also was a killer. She's the one who did the hit and run that killed her father. There were no hints at this at all, so it comes out of left field pretty well. Her father was still alive and urged her to flee so it wouldn't ruin her life any more than his death already would. So her grief over him makes a lot of sense, because she's also carrying around the guilt of his death. Though it was explained that there wasn't any avoiding it. His car broke down in a very dangerous spot of road and he was likely going to be hit by someone. It just ended up being her. While I do like that Ann got back at Rachel and punished her for murdering people, as there was no way the legal system was going to be able to, I don't like that Ann got where she wanted to in life in such a duplicitous manner. If you're looking for morality, it's not in this book. 

Rachel is barely a likeable character ever. Typical spoiled rich girl involved with a man too old for her. She's never had friends, which is kind of a sign there's something wrong with her. Rich people usually at least have hangers-on. All she's capable of seeing is how she can get what she wants. She sets her parents up to have a boating accident, though she also could have died in it. She just happens to live. Her roommate in college committed suicide and there's no way of proving she did anything, but she likely did. She gets involved with Patrick to further her career and then, before Ann is there, sleeps with Leo for fun. Then she's not content to let Ann end up with Leo without messing with that. She gets Ann to keep the secret of the cards and work on the article behind Patrick's back, even though he owns the deck. I'm not sure she's ever supposed to be likeable or relatable. She may be written this way on purpose. 

Then there's Leo. The author thinks so little of him that he doesn't even rate a solid physical description. I think tall and lanky are about all she gave him. Leo is a wannabe playwright, who grows poison plants at the Cloisters, keeps cuttings from them and sells them in some of the NYC street markets. Illegally. He also is revealed to be a thief and then tells Ann that Rachel helped him out with this. He puts no sense of value on historical objects and for that, I'm glad he got caught. I never liked him. He wasn't portrayed as the bad boy so much as an asshole almost all the time. He was okay in his earliest scenes but quickly went downhill. He's even happy to be doing jail time for his thefts, because he sees it as writing time. 

Patrick is a caricature. Older professor who likes the younger girls. Naturally he's hooking up with one of his researchers, Rachel, but I'm sure he's done it before. He doesn't seem to ever really do much within his field. He obsesses over the tarot and does ritualistic readings in the Cloisters library. 

The other characters are the Cloisters themselves, the world of academic and museum scholarship, and the tarot. All are handled equally poorly. Most of the book is set in the Cloisters, but the descriptions don't really take you there. They made me remember a few things from my visit, but I never felt truly there. Academia is mostly represented by rejections (true) and the poorly-written section on a symposium. I wanted so much more from characters who should have all been scholars. And the tarot was treated the worst. Ann has zero interest in and then all of a sudden feels this mystical connection and then it's like overnight she learns everything about it. Really badly written. 

So yeah, way to take a good premise and setting and turn it into a boring, shitty book. The only thing I really enjoyed was the reveal that Ann killed her dad. I'm impressed with how I did not see that coming. A few things made me happily remember New York City and the Cloisters, but that doesn't mean the author handled them well. Just means it doesn't take much to trigger good memories.

Skip this one.

The Year of the Witching

The Year of the Witching is set in an alternate world where one small location, Bethel, sets itself away from everywhere else. It's obsessed with its religion, which involves two opposing deities: the Father and the Dark Mother. The Father is the sun and all things good, while the Mother is the moon and evil. 

Guess what this means. If you said misogyny, you are correct. 

This is a highly patriarchal society where men take multiple wives, most often vastly younger than they are. The worst offender is the Prophet, the current high priest. He's got to have over a dozen wives. I can't remember if a number is said. The Prophet is gifted with some sort of future Sight and once his heir has his first vision, the current Prophet dies shortly after. His apostles sometimes have also possessed powers, like being able to tell if someone is lying or not. Women occasionally have also had these "gifts." The lead character's grandmother is a midwife and her gift is to know the name the Father wants the child to have. 

Immanuelle is our lead girl. Her mother was the wayward daughter of an apostle. She hooked up with a farm boy from the Outskirts. The Outskirts are where they put a group of outsiders a long time ago and now they're basically stuck living there, even though they've adopted the customs of Bethel. Oh, and they're black while the main Bethelites are white. Yeah, misogyny AND racism. Bethel sucks. So Immanuelle's mom and her farm boy got caught. He got burned on a pyre because the Prophet wanted Immanuelle's mom and he was a jealous prick. After trying to kill the Prophet, Immanuelle's mom ran away into the forbidden Darkwoods, where she met up with the legendary four witches that are daughters of the Dark Mother. She returned a few months later, about to give birth, and her father took her in, even though he'd lose his position in the church for it. She dies after the baby is born but lives long enough to hear her mother (the midwife) name the baby Immanuelle. She's amused by this. 

So Immanuelle is the town outcast because she's the only half-Outsider (AKA: half-black) and her mom was evil. She also likes to read a lot and that's not encouraged for women in patriarchy land. 

There is so much going on in this book. I'm just going to briefly summarize things, I think. 

Immanuelle and her BFF Leah are hanging out after church and have an encounter with Ezra, the Prophet's oldest son, who's like the town catch. Leah is going to be the Prophet's next wife, which Immanuelle is not thrilled about. After a failed trip to the market, Immanuelle's black ram gets away from her and she follows it into the forbidden woods, where she meets two of the four witches. 

Ah, an aside on the witches. Their whole presence is really unexplained, because they were once living women, but this was I believe "centuries" ago and they died in this huge holy war where the patriarchy fought them. Now they're in the forest so they're kinda undead. How they got undead, I don't know if it ever said. Presumably their Dark Mother resurrected them or something. The main one of the four is Lilith, because of course it is. She's very tall and her head is entirely encased in a deer skull with huge antlers. The second one is the sexy one: Delilah, the Witch of the Water. She always comes up out of water. The third and fourth are the Lovers: Jael and Mercy. One is blonde, the other is prettier, taller and black-haired. It was never incredibly clear which is which, but I think the blonde is Mercy and the dark one is Jael. They don't seem to have any distinction other than being lesbians. Their appearances are all beaten, bruised and creepy in general. 

Okay, so Immanuelle gets her mother's diary from Mercy and she's more drawn to the woods than ever. She ends up finding a pond and meeting Delilah, who lures her into it. She just happens to get her first period (at sixteen) and that turns into an inadvertent blood sacrifice because those were done in the Dark Mother's pond. She encounters Lilith, too. 

Then the plagues come. Immanuelle realizes the words her mother wrote over and over at the end of her diary are four plagues: blood, blight, darkness, slaughter. 

Now we've got the quest-type part where and she and Ezra are working to stop the plagues. Immanuelle eventually realizes her mother turned her into sort of a curse. She escapes the town to find her paternal grandmother, who explains that Immanuelle's mom tried to protect her by giving her a lot of power, but the witches twisted that, made the mom go mad, and that's how the curses came about. She tells Immanuelle that she can turn the power of the curses back into herself and control them, so Immanuelle has this big plan to go save Bethel. It gets pretty dramatic, but she pulls it off and hopefully, Bethel will turn into a better place for women, but I dunno. 

All of that is extremely simplified. The book is pretty action-packed and it constantly flows forward. The characters are all decent, both the ones you're supposed to like as well as the obvious bad guys. There's a lot here, but it's mostly good so it's well worth reading. 

As far as the horror element, the witches are creepy, but it's the men of the town who are the true horror. When you've got people that old going after young girls, there's gonna be rape. I'm not going into detail because it's a spoiler but definite pedophilia and rape. 

The main thing that I wanted more of was the witches and the backstory. There are hints that a lot of what happened to the witches and women back in the holy war days was unfair misogyny and the slaughter of women and girls. I wanted to know more about the history and especially more about each of the witches. I think the author deliberately left it out though, because the witches aren't supposed to be the evil that's actually good. No, they're still perfectly happy vengeance killing people. They feel slightly sympathetic but if she'd taken that too far, then maybe the people would have rooted for them too much when it's really both sides who are bad. But I still wanted to know more. They're the only characters that weren't even close to developed. Everyone else was done nicely. 

If you like witches, religious horror, and a setting that feels historical but isn't based in our reality, I'd check this out. 

Stevie Bell 4

This is the fourth novel starring teen detective Stevie Bell, but the first one to be outside the Truly Devious case, so I'm switching my heading for these to "Stevie Bell." I've got the fifth one coming in tomorrow and there's no point in calling them "Truly Devious" if that case is over. 

This one is by far my favorite of the four so far. Stevie has anxiety and she goes into her own head a lot, but in this one, you can see she's grown and gotten at least the beginning of a grasp on how to control these things. She's definitely matured over the course of all the books. 

I don't know if I ever wrote about it, but I like Stevie and yet I have to say Johnson really leaned into the "I'm not like other girls" trope. You get the sense she's an attractive girl, but Johnson goes out of her way to make her look bad. She likes comfortable clothes. That's fine. But honestly, she's almost always dirty. That's a bit gross. She looks cute in a pixie cut...but she bleaches and cuts it herself and it's supposed to be pretty sloppy. There are several mentions of how she's a disappointment to her parents because they want her to like fashion and boys and typical "girly" things. She bemoans this sometimes by feeling like there's something wrong with her because she doesn't. Thankfully, these moments are mostly sparse, but I do always mentally yell at her in my head and tell her to wash her damn clothes. 

Anyway, Stevie is recruited by a guy who just bought a summer camp. He wants to make a podcast about the murders that took place there in 1978. So we've got flashback chapters to 1978, though sadly they don't run through the entire book like they did with Truly Devious. 

This is set up like a typical slasher film. Overprivileged mayor's son gets away with hit and running a young boy. He, his bad girl girlfriend, the town weed dealer, and the town good girl are all camp counselors that go into the woods together and get murdered together. Suspects abound but no one is ever charged.

Stevie brings along Janelle and Nate to be fellow counselors, though they're not really counselors. Nate is supposed to be running the library and Janelle the arts and crafts. Janelle really goes for the arts and crafts. She's the only one who wants to do her job. Stevie wants to do her real job, which is solving the case. This one is called the Box in the Woods, because three of the victims were stuffed into an old hunting blind. 

I liked the flashback chapters and the characters. It goes along at a pretty good pace, which it has to, since it's one book instead of a trilogy this time. I actually had bits of it figured out but not put together fully. Like I knew certain things that seemed unimportant were actually the motive, but you don't learn exactly what happened until the reveal. But yeah, Stevie solves another one. Not because other people couldn't, but because she found pieces of evidence that they hadn't and one was actually found by Janelle just by chance.

Nate was amusing at first because he thinks he's going to live alone in the library, which had a room added for him, and then gets stuck briefly being an actual counselor. Happy Nate was funny. Janelle is mostly good but has one moment where she's a dick to Stevie because she's envious that David came to visit while Vi is in Vietnam. Don't be mean to people in relationships just because your partner isn't right there. And David and Stevie of course get into a fight because she's working on the case and he's trying to tell her he's going to England for school next year. Dude, you know how she is when she's working. 

Next up, Stevie goes to visit David in England and gets to work on a cold case from the 1990s. Yay. I wish this was coming today instead of tomorrow. 

Truly Devious 3

Ah, finally, everything is solved. 

SPOILERS

Stevie works to solve both cases in this final book of the trilogy. Naturally, they are tied together by something other than just the location. 

There's a huge blizzard coming to Ellingham and a strange accident during Janelle's presentation of her Rube Goldberg device leads the administration to close the school for a while. They rush to get everyone out before the storm hits, except David makes an appearance and talks the Minerva crew into staying. This includes Stevie, Nate and Janelle, of course, but also Vi, Janelle's partner, and Hunter, the nephew of Stevie's advisor who died in the fire at the end of the second book. 

Stevie and Janelle find Francis's diary from 1936 in the walls of her room. David recruits Hunter and Vi to help him go through the flash drives he stole from his father, trying to find something to ruin his presidential campaign. Janelle and Vi fight over this. David and Stevie are still fighting. It's so pleasant. 

Stevie goes off on her own, having worked out something in Francis's diary and ends up falling into a hole, down into Ellingham's secret grotto, which Albert was working on as a present for his wife, Iris, back in the 30s. David follows her and the two are trapped, but then they find Francis's dynamite stash and try to blow their way out. Germaine surprises everyone by appearing and coming to the rescue. 

Back at the Great House, Stevie works everything out and presents her case to the gathered students and faculty members. And Larry appears just as she's wrapping up, ready to stop the culprit from fleeing and reveal where Alice's body has been hidden. 

So the Truly Devious letter was never connected to the case. We know Edward committed suicide in France when the Nazis arrived, but Francis's life remains a mystery. We know George Marsh, Albert Ellingham's pet FBI guy, was actually the one behind the kidnapping, aiming to use the ransom to pay off gambling debts. Everything went wrong though and Iris ended up shot and Alice was missing. Marsh, in the flashback chapters, finds one of the guys he worked with and forces him to lead him to the very remote home where they left Alice with a random couple. Alice sadly died from the measles only a couple weeks ago. Marsh is furious. He digs up Alice, kills the kidnapper and buries him in her place, then kills the couple because they didn't take her to a doctor, having figured out who she was. Marsh returns her body to her home and buries it in the tunnel behind the house, but is discovered by Leonard Holmes Nair, the painter, and Marsh tells him the story of finding Alice. Oh, and the other family friend, Flora, was revealed earlier to have been Alice's mother, and in a later chapter, she tells Marsh he's the father. Nair figures this out, too, but he and Marsh agree never to tell Albert Ellingham and also to let him still believe Alice is alive somewhere. Eventually, Albert would realize Marsh was the culprit and the two would blow themselves up in a boat. 

That takes care of the past mystery. The connection to the present day is that head admin Charles found the codicil added to Ellingham's will, stating that money would be set aside for Alice until her 90th birthday and if that passed without her being found, it would go to the school. Charles worked with Dr. Fenton, Stevie's advisor from book two, thinking she'd cash in and they'd share the money, as it couldn't be done by someone working for the school. Hayes and then Ellie both had to die in books one and two because they found out too much. Fenton changed her mind and then Charles had to kill her, too. He never murdered anyone directly but set them up to be in situations that were fatal. He was also the one who projected the message onto Stevie's wall in book one, and the one who trapped Stevie and David in the grotto in this book. He even had Hunter stay on at the school so he could then be the one to collect the money. 

How? Because Charles found Alice's body when the workers began excavating the tunnel. Larry finds it hidden in the wall. Charles is held overnight but ends up killing himself. David's group finds blackmail stuff on the flash drives and destroys it, so his dad can't use it to blackmail anyone anymore, leading to a ton of his supporters backing out, as they were only there because of the blackmail. The couples all make up and even Germaine and Hunter start a thing. The school reopens. David is out campaigning for another candidate who would have opposed his dad if he hadn't had to back out of the run for presidency. 

I liked this one the best, I think. The only thing I didn't like was Mudge getting hurt in Janelle's accident and getting zero screentime. I love Mudge. Janelle was a total badass and Nate was awesome. It felt more well-rounded character-wise than the first two. 

Oh, and Stevie gets the fame from solving the Ellingham case, but not the money...because she's the only one that realizes Alice was never related to Iris or Albert at all. The DNA results on the little body in the wall aren't a match for the Ellinghams. She won't say anything though to try to prove her case. She'd rather the money go to the school. 

Next up, there's a standalone book about a summer camp mystery!

Truly Devious 2

I read this sequel to Truly Devious months ago and managed never to review it. Genius. I picked this series back up yesterday and reread the first two books. So here I am finally doing this review.

This one picks up with detective heroine Stevie back in her hometown. After Hayes's murder in the first book, she's yanked out of school by her parents, but the man they work for, the Trump-esque Senator Edward King, uses his clout to get them to agree to send her back to school. Stevie found a major clue right before she got pulled from school, so she agrees to go back. King's one condition is that she watch over and stay friends with his son, David, who Stevie had a tentative romantic relationship with before it was revealed at the very end that he was the son of the person she despises most. 

Stevie's friends Nate and Janelle are happy to have her back, as is Janelle's non-binary partner Vi, who makes a few more appearances than they did in the first one. I love all three of those characters. 

I also love the new addition to the gang, though he only makes a handful of appearances. Mudge is a six-and-a-half-foot tall goth boy who wears purple snake eye contacts and is obsessed with Disney to the point that he wants to work there. He's kind, gentle, highly intelligent, and very savvy when it comes to dealing with the emotions of others. I hope we see more of him in the third book. 

So Stevie returns to school, where David has been acting out, but he improves when Stevie returns, recruiting her to help him figure out what happened to Ellie. Stevie is assigned an internship along with her regular classes. She's to work with an author who wrote the first book she ever read on the Ellingham case, so she's pretty excited, until she sees just how unhinged the alcoholic, hoarder, paranoid technophobe is. But the author does lead her to search for a tunnel in her dorm. On Halloween night, she and David find it...and they discover Ellie's corpse. She escaped from the Great House back toward the dorm using the hidden tunnels, only to become trapped down there. It comes out that Stevie is back thanks to David's father, which he doesn't take well, acting out even worse and then leaving campus. 

The flashbacks to the 30s are interesting, but not too much happens in them this time. They introduce Frankie, a pyromanic rich girl obsessed with gangsters, and her boyfriend Edward, a hedonistic poet. It's these two that sent the original Truly Devious letter, so that was never connected to the kidnapping/murder at all. Stevie puts this together near the end. The other flashbacks are all tied to the reveal of the mastermind behind the plot and tell more as the end of the book draws closer. Stevie figures everything out and realizes it was George Marsh, Ellingham's FBI guy, who orchestrated the whole thing, although his simple plan quickly got out of control. Ellingham also figured it out back in 1938 and took Marsh out on a boat loaded with explosives to get a confession out of him. Marsh confesses all, though he never says where Alice is, and then lights a cigarette, which blows them both up. In the present, someone has also blown up the home of the author Stevie had been working with. And that's where the book ends. 

Again, the main characters are definitely Stevie and The Mystery, but I felt like we got more Janelle and Nate this time, as well as Vi and Mudge, so I was more pleased with the character inclusion than in the first book. Frankie is a far more interesting past character than Edward. Edward's life and death are revealed, but I'm hoping Stevie learns more about what happened to Frankie. All we know is that she moved to Paris and had a daughter. 

So now the big mystery is mostly solved except for one thing: where is Alice? And there's a new twist. If someone can find Alice before her 90th birthday, they get 10 million dollars. Otherwise, it goes to the school. Hmm... There were some hints that the school officials know about this. Gee, wonder if they're behind some of these incidents that seem to happen when people get too close.