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.
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