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.
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