These Riveting and Funny YA Mysteries by Author Maureen Johnson Are Must-Reads

This is Johnson's most recently published work. It’s a standalone mystery with dual timelines: one today and one in the 1930s.

In the present day, Marlowe Wexler just had the worst date. We’re not talking about it subjectively. She finally got the girl of her dreams to agree to go out with her…and somehow the place she was visiting burns down. Yeah, that kind of worst date.

So now out of the job and out of a second date, she ends up getting a job giving tours of Morning House, built in the 1920s. But soon she becomes obsessed with two mysterious deaths that took place there in the 1930s…

In an author event, Johnson talked about how crime scenes were handled now and in the 1930s. There just wasn’t the same level of crime-fighting technology—she described it as analog—and so there wasn’t as much knowledge about contaminating the crime scene.

The police and other people would walk across the crime scene, make sure to put their fingerprints on everything, and take photos…with the corpse, as Johnson explained. 

Many people may know Johnson from her five-book (so far) series featuring the incredible Stevie Bell. The first three books are the Truly Devious series with books four and five as more standalone mysteries.

It opens at the Ellingham Academy, a private school that allows students to focus on their passions, whether it's writing a novel or building robots. 

Stevie Bell is thrilled to leave her small town with very conservative parents to pursue her one great love: the Truly Devious mystery. Not long after the school was opened by its founder Albert Ellingham, his wife and daughter are kidnapped.

The only clue is a letter signed “Truly, Devious.” No one knew who the culprits were nor what happened to the wife and daughter. And that’s what Stevie is going to solve. But solving a cold case is not all that Stevie has to do.

She’s got to solve a present-day murder on the campus. The first three books follow Stevie as she tries to figure out what happened decades ago as well as find justice for the murders happening in front of her.

The other two more standalone books take place at a sleepaway camp and an English manor. I love how she describes in Book 5 Nine Liars in one of her interviews “English manor house ax murder.” 

In her author talk, she talked about her process of writing her mysteries. Johnson explained that she writes the ending first. She has never written a book in chronological order.

Her philosophy is that you need to know everything your characters are doing at all times.

We know that English villages have a really high murder rate.

So Johnson has decided to help visitors avoid death and destruction in the English countryside. Or not.

The most banal or innocent-seeming things can and will take a person’s life.

Illustrated with apt Edward Goreylike drawings, it's definitely a fun parody of all things British murder mystery. It’s a short read but an important one should you find yourself lost in the English countryside.

For a change of pace, we’ll end with Johnson’s Shades of London 3 book, 1 novella series. Aurora “Rory” Deveaux is spending her senior year abroad at a boarding school in the UK.

Figuring out a new school and new country is hard enough, but there’s a killer loose, one who seems to be taking a page from Jack the Ripper’s playbook. The victim is killed exactly the same way Jack’s victims were over a 100 years ago.

But when Rory sees someone who she thinks is the police’s suspect, she realizes that no one else can see them. Is it a ghost? Is it a living person?

Now Rory has to help bring this serial killer to justice without becoming one of their victims first.