★★★★☆ Stevie is what I love about the Truly Devious books

Nine Liars

Maureen Johnson

I will begin with a confession: I don't really like murder mystery novels. What I mean by that is, I don't like them more than any other type of novel. When I read a mystery, I read it as I would any other novel -- that is, as a story, with characters and a plot. The mystery is only interesting to me as the plot of this particular novel. I don't care if the author follows the strangely arbitrary rules that mysteries are supposed to adhere to. (Some of them, indeed, I find tiresome, such as the scene in the end where the sleuth gathers all the possible suspects in a room together and reveals all. I will never forgive Agatha Christie for inflicting that monstrosity on us.) The mystery to me is no more than a plot. I want it to be a good plot -- I don't really care if it's a good mystery, in the way that mystery fanatics judge such things.

I do, however, like certain mystery novels. That includes Maureen Johnson's Truly Devious series. I can say what I like about Truly Devious in one word: Stevie. Stevie (that would be Stephanie Bell) is the heroine at the center of Truly Devious. She's the daughter of ordinary conservative American parents who just want their daughter to be a Nice Girl, hook up with a Nice Guy, and eventually have a Nice Family. Stevie has less than zero interest in being a Nice Girl. She is not interested in her body, or in clothes. Here is how she describes her wardrobe:

She was the kind of person who had both kinds of shirts: the T-shirts with writing on them and those without. There were the jeans she liked, the ones that fit okay, and the ones that fit badly but she’d bought them and was therefore stuck with them for the rest of her life, or whatever it was that happened to jeans. She’d brought the one dress she owned, which was black and still had the tags on it.

But don't get the idea that Stevie cares about nothing. Poet Robert Bly is reported to have said

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

(By the way, if someone could identify the source of that quote for me, I would be grateful.)

This is not a calamity that afflicts Stevie. Stevie is obsessed with murder. More specifically, she is obsessed with unsolved murders from the past. In the first four books of Truly Devious she solved several murders, including two mysteries that had remained unsolved for decades, and she is now moderately famous among those who care about such things.

As Nine Liars opens Stevie is beginning her senior year at Ellingham Academy, and she is bored.

All she needed, really, was a little murder. Not a big one. A little something to take the edge off... There were so many murders out there. Surely, she could have one.

Her friends Nate, Janelle, and Vi are with her at Minerva House. Stevie's unreliable boyfriend David is in England, studying at Cambridge for a semester. David invites Stevie and her friends for a two-week work-study visit in London. They arrive, and Stevie gets her wish. David's friend Izzy tell Stevie's gang of an old murder that happened to friends of her aunt, at a country house owned by one of said friends.

Johnson explains Nine Liars as follows.

I did it. I finally wrote an English country house mystery. This has been a goal of my life. Little Maureen spent many afternoons with her head in a mystery, dreaming of finding the body in the library. I was bad at kickball, but I was good at finding the murderer.

And it's good. Stevie is as lovable as ever. Nate, Janelle, and Vi remain the faithful friends, and David the somewhat skeazy boyfriend. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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